Dual boot Windows 11 home / Zorin 18 Pro decision or something else?

Hey Philipp,
I had a somewhat similar situation with my daily use laptop. I really wanted to get away from windows but I use quicken to manage my bank accounts and credit card accounts. Quicken does not have a Linux version yet. (one day, I hope..) anyway, I had already switched my old HP desktop to Ubuntu, an older laptop to Zorin 17 and my wife's laptop to Zorin 17. All 3 were not compatible with windows 11. I finally decided to switch my daily use laptop to Zorin 18 last weekend. (yikes!) I created a backup image of my laptop, copied some important files to Dropbox took a breath and installed Zorin 18 directly to my hard drive. Worked beautifully. I then installed the virtual machine manager (QEMU/KVM). I then installed a bare bones windows 10 image in the virtual machine, downloaded/installed the quicken app in windows 10 and then downloaded my quicken data file from Dropbox. Cranked it up and everything worked perfectly. Now I use Zorin all day and when I want to run the quicken app I fire up the virtual session and do what I need to do.
If this is a brand new PC then you need to load all your data files anyway.
I assume (I know, I know) that if your wife doesn't have a Microsoft account she hasn't done a lot in windows already. Let her spend her learning time learning Linux/Zorin.

Just do some research on installing the virtual machine manager and windows OS within , there are a ton of YouTube videos available.

Lots of luck!

Thank you very much for all your replies and tips.

II finally decided to install Zorin 18 Pro on an external hard-drive. I created a live-stick in Mint. To prevent my system to break, I disconnected all my hard-drives (I have an old fashioned minitower PC that gives my easy access to the hard-drives) and just pluged in both the live-stick and the external drive. So I can install Zorin on that drive.

For the laptop, I will leave Windows 11 untouched but only disable fastboot and secure boot so I can boot from the external drive.

The drawback of this is, that I need to install Zorin 18 again one day (if finally chosen as one and only operating system). But that is acceptable while both systems can be used in the future.

Thank you again.
Philipp