I lived in Austin, TX and used to know a homeless guy, Walter Dwight Green 1955, back in '98 that spent winters in jail for public intoxication for the same reasons.
Including name, in case anyone else knew him and wants to chat. He was originally from Kentucky.
I was a teenager at the time but I tried to help him as much as I could.
I had to leave town for a year, when I came back, I found out he froze to death in the winter I was gone.
If you are going to dual boot and your computer has room for 2 drives. The way I would recommend doing it is to add a second drive for Linux, and disconnect to windows drive from the computer. Do a normal linux install. And then add the windows drive back in. Then you can set one of the drives as the default boot device and if you want to boot to the other just open the Boot options on boot.
This keeps things totally separated and you can even remove one of the drives later if you want to single boot.