I’ll probably be doing the same. I expect a clean computer to work moderately well, but I’m dreading setting up a dual boot so I can spend some time transitioning, especially trying to keep track of where games are installed.
Speaking as someone who has recently gone through this headache: if you’re fortunate enough to have your games on their own partition, you will probably want to migrate said partition over to a Linux filesystem (ext4, btrfs, etc.) sooner rather than later. Particularly for Steam games - it’s possible to mount NTFS partitions on Linux and you might even be able to get the partition to mount as read/write somewhat reliably, but getting Steam on Linux to parse those directories and read the installed games is… … well, it isn’t worth it, frankly. Easier to just bite the bullet and be done with it.
That was the most difficult part of transitioning to Linux for me, though. Most everything else either worked out of the box or was a breeze to set up. Even the printer - go figure. Anyway. You got this!
I had brought in a disk from another old PC of mine that was an NTFS formatted drive but no Windows on it. It worked OK for games. It seemed to work a lot better than what people complained about. I wonder if it was because there was no boot partition or any oddness with how NTFS works with hibernation on system partitions.
Permissions weren’t an issue because I just mounted the NTFS partitions with the user option.
I did eventually copy it over to a btrfs partition though for dedupe and snapshots like everything else.
I switched to Linux (mint). It kind of sucked getting it set up but at least I don’t have to deal with Microsoft much anymore.
I’ll probably be doing the same. I expect a clean computer to work moderately well, but I’m dreading setting up a dual boot so I can spend some time transitioning, especially trying to keep track of where games are installed.
If you use mint and it won’t boot from the live USB stick a second time, you may have to rename a file on the USB drive.
If it hangs on the last step of the installer, I don’t know how to fix that but the previous LTS version of mint worked fine.
Those were the two biggest hurdles I faced. Good luck.
Speaking as someone who has recently gone through this headache: if you’re fortunate enough to have your games on their own partition, you will probably want to migrate said partition over to a Linux filesystem (ext4, btrfs, etc.) sooner rather than later. Particularly for Steam games - it’s possible to mount NTFS partitions on Linux and you might even be able to get the partition to mount as read/write somewhat reliably, but getting Steam on Linux to parse those directories and read the installed games is… … well, it isn’t worth it, frankly. Easier to just bite the bullet and be done with it.
That was the most difficult part of transitioning to Linux for me, though. Most everything else either worked out of the box or was a breeze to set up. Even the printer - go figure. Anyway. You got this!
I had brought in a disk from another old PC of mine that was an NTFS formatted drive but no Windows on it. It worked OK for games. It seemed to work a lot better than what people complained about. I wonder if it was because there was no boot partition or any oddness with how NTFS works with hibernation on system partitions.
Permissions weren’t an issue because I just mounted the NTFS partitions with the user option.
I did eventually copy it over to a btrfs partition though for dedupe and snapshots like everything else.