That’s pretty much it, after several months, maybe even a year of wanting to take the leap, a couple days ago I finally did it. I just wanted to share this cuz I think it’s an absolute win, and I guess just see if anyone has any general advice to keep in mind during the process. I ended up choosing Fedora, right now I’m dual booting while I’m still in the process of finding software alternatives and getting everything set up, but trying to minimize my use of windows as much as possible, and so far I’ve been loving it. I love this community and I just wanted to thank everyone that has given any advice or suggestions in the past, i’m really excited about this and grateful that I could get to this point.
I’ve been wanting to take the leap, too. I’ve got Linux installed on my gaming laptop and I’ve been trying games one by one to see if they work. Next step is dual booting on my desktop and only switching to Windows when I absolutely can’t make something work. My biggest concern is that I have a bunch of games installed on various drives that are all Windows (NTFS?) formatted and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to run them on Linux. I really don’t want to have to reinstall all of them.
You can read NTFS drives; I still have shared drives from my Windows install despite barely using Windows at all.
You can generally import steam libraries, and then steam can do the proton work.
And you can sometimes run other programmes in Linux from the windows install - i.e. it can have it’s own Wine prefix in Linux and use the installed files on the NTFS. But this doesn’t always work - if the programme’s or game’s installer makes significant system changes or installs other software then they won’t exist in the Wine prefix and the game may not work. It’s better to install windows games fresh so everything is installed into the wine prefix.
And Lutris is well set up with scripts for installing a wide range of games from their installers; it will avoid problems reinstalling games fresh.
You will probably have to reinstall all of them under Wine or Proton or whatever. I don’t think it can import existing installations.
Linux can read and write to NTFS drives just fine. Just make sure you’re using the newer native (in-kernel) driver, ntfs3. The older user-mode driver, ntfs-3g, still works but has much worse performance, which I guess should be a concern if you’re going to run games off of it (ntfs-3g is fine for casual use)
Also, make sure you have backups. I don’t care how stable NTFS drivers are I don’t fucking trust them for daily use, especially writes.
I recommend copying files off of NTFS and onto ext4 if you’re able. If you can’t, try to keep operations to read only.
I’ve lost too many drives due to stupid issues (sometimes me making an error, sometimes the driver not working properly).
Backup:
I’d check https://www.protondb.com/ and if they your favorite ones are native/gold/platinum then… move on. I’d initially NOT erase my drives and, assuming you have either patience and/or a fast connection, just let it re-download and install overnight, then enjoy. If need be bring the saves back (but again via Steam, should just work) and only once that’s done, erase the Windows partitions. This is a no risk process. Honestly some games will not work but IMHO this isn’t the question. The question rather is… will you have more playable games than time left, if so, then considering moving even without 100% coverage.
ntfs drives do work in linux, but there may be some issues sometimes. i switched alnost 2 years ago and i have distrohopped a bit. fedora and nobara had intermittent issues with the ntfs drive, it suddenly became unmountable and it takes some fighting to get it back. in mint, the drive constantly corrupts files and entire folders, and the only way to delete those is to boot into windows and delete them there.
There is a linux NTFS fix package, I forget the proper name, it tries to clean up the filesystem like windows would