Which comes first, the Win8 chicken or the Ubuntu egg?

[Billy-Quizboy]

I have a decommssioned fleet Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 6075 and I want to dualboot.

It has no OS, a big, fresh, unpartitioned DASD in it, and the luxury of my choice: First installing Win 8.1 or any Ubuntu (or another distro) without worrying about preserving and restoring data/settings/drivers/profiles. (Also I don't need to get it built for my non-tech-savvy relative in a week.)

My experience level includes Windows alone, Ubuntu over XP, and many distros clean-sheet alone to HD and from USB, but never a dual-booted Win7 or Win8 with any Linux.

Which do I want to do first?

I'm hopefully not repeating a common thread. From what the folks here say, Microsoft's UEFI makes it less easy to put Linux on after Win 8.1, but also putting Windows on after a Linux means I'll have to recover or restore the Grub boot loader.

Thanks for any answers in advance.

[ubfan1]

What does UEFI have to do with your machine? Windows 8.1 only comes preinstalled on UEFI machines, but you're installing it on an older machine. All the old rules apply, and they indicate you'll have less trouble putting Windows on first. I assume you will do it once and cloan the rest, so the actual work on setting up the first machine need not be duplicated.

[Billy-Quizboy]

Yeah, I should have said what I meant: A fresh, unopened box of Win8 leftover from a year ago, which I will upgrade to Win8.1 at the earliest.

Does that still indicate Win8, upgrade to Win8.1, then my Linux?

[ubfan1]

The Win 8 -> 8.1 upgrade reset the fast boot option, but didn't give me any other problems, and the fast boot was easy enough to reset. Myself, I'd like to get Ubuntu on the machine as soon as possible ;^)