Understood, thanks!

I think most games I play have Linux compatibility so this shouldn’t be an issue, but is there any other filesystem I could use for a shared drive where I install Steam games and access them from both OS or is it generally a bad idea and I should stick to one?

Thanks for the answers (and additional info)! There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t fully understand but I’ll reread through the comments when I have more questions after installing so it’ll definitely be helpful!

A couple more questions just in case:

If you go for Fedora, make sure to enable “third-party repositories” or “proprietary repositories” when installing the distro, as it is needed to install Nvidia drivers, Steam, and a few other things

I’m assuming you said Fedora as an example but it’s something I should do on any distro which asks that on installation, correct? And is there any downside of doing this besides maybe taking up more space?

Also being a “recent convert” and maybe having it more fresh in your memory compared to other commenters, do you have any recommendations on sites/documents/videos/guides I could use to get a better understanding of how to use Linux in general (or even specifically Mint/similar distros)? I read a few pages of TLDP’s guide but I realized it was very outdated and I might’ve ended up reading hundreds of pages only to find out most of it worked differently nowadays.

Thanks for the answers!

Also, when running Windows software through Wine, you do have to be careful of malware. Generally, Linux is extremely resistant to malware, even in this case, but if the Windows program you’re trying to run includes malware, there is a chance that it could end up doing undesirable things to your Linux system, or at least that it could infect or mess up your Wine installation.

The most likely way this could happen is if you download an infected file in Linux, then boot into Windows and open the infected file.

In both of these cases though, I would have to consciously run a program/open a new file though, correct? Is running it through Bitdefender first good enough to ensure it’s safe?

OHH dammit it wasn’t that hard, I really didn’t make the connection sorry lol

Understood, thanks for the clarifications (…though sorry but I still didn’t understand the “exfat is widely supported b6 “everything”” part lol)

not sure exactly what metadata you mean, i don’t really know well about NTFS’s advanced features. i just tend to have some version of windows installed in another partition or a drive and ocasionally copy files from and to it, never had any issues.

Mostly the common user-facing properties stuff like date created/modified/taken, did everything get saved/transferred correctly or is it just something you didn’t personally care about?

Start up virtualbox or any virtual machine on your windows machine and test drive a few different distributions until you find one you like.

Spin up virtual box again and restore your machine into it. You may have license activation issues but you’ll have access your data. Move your data out of the VM and onto your home folder.

My plan was to, respectively, try distros from live versions and transferring files by copy-pasting everything onto a different drive and back, are there benefits in doing them the ways you suggested instead?

Also note that win11 isn’t nearly as bad as people here say.

Ehh… I tried booting that other “test” PC that I have with W11 and I got a ton of random popups, plus I really don’t like the interface and all the stuff baked in like CoPilot and Recall. I know you can disable them in some way, but if I have to go through the hassle of doing that (plus circumventing the hardware requirements), I might as well use that time to try and understand Linux a bit.

Linux has malware. It’s just different.

First time I hear this, what do you mean? Other commenters said that the permission structure prevents them, are there malware who circumvent that or do you mean like phishing/baiting you into giving permissions to a trojan?

Thanks for the answers!

I’m pretty sure there’s no problem with NTFS on Linux now, but I don’t guarantee though…

I heard I might have some metadata issues due to it being a reverse-enginereed version, I assume in your experience that didn’t happen?

It surely can corrupt a file e.g. you run a document editor in WINE and the program crashes while the file is open.

So I assume I should still check for compatibility before running something that opens other files, I guess?

What you’re looking for is “Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC 21H2”.

Understood, 21H2 and 2021 are two names for the same thing, correct?

But anyway, I don’t recommend regular Win10, just switch to IoT LTSC :)

Yeah, the options are in order of preference so of course regular W10 would be the worst option, I asked just in case I didn’t manage to activate LTSC in time (by the way, are there any downsides to activating it with massgrave and the others compared to buying a key from… certain sites? It’s relatively cheap so I wouldn’t mind but if it’s exactly the same I might as well save some bucks)

Thanks for the answers!

1c: Firefox profiles are fully portable to any other Firefox install.

I knew they had an export/sync feature, but does it include stuff like browser history as well?

1e: Nothing. It doesn’t touch any of your filesystems unless YOU touch them. Don’t delete anything, and you’re fine. It should even automount your existing identified partitions for you to browse through.

I was mostly afraid of deleting something by mistake since I don’t know much about how the commands work, but by your reply I assume it’s not something easy to do unintentionally (?)

2-3: I wouldn’t even bother trying to figure any of this out, because Microsoft constantly changes their mind about this, and they’ll soon just force you into this abomination of Windows 12 they’ve been talking about recently.

Yeah, I’d avoid doing that too, but I have a lot of hoarded stuff and might still need a windows partition in case some of my friends really want to play something with anti-cheat. Of course, even if I do end up going the LTSC way for the main pc, I’m still gonna try and learn Linux at the same time on the secondary one, I know it’s just delaying the inevitable.

Thanks for the answers!

exfat is widely supported b6 “everything”

Sorry, could you ELI5 this part? (and I heard exFAT doesn’t have journaling so a power outage could result in data loss, did they add it or should I get an UPS just in case?)

So in other words, if you boot from a live USB, you have to actually try to ruin anything on your disk - I’m having a hard time imagining how one would do this by accident.

So my persistent storage isn’t mounted by default when I boot from a live version, correct? And if I do mount something, it should still be ok unless I do some weird specific thing with the CLI?

I posted it here because it had some non-Linux related questions, but where would you suggest posting it otherwise? Simply on !linux@programming.dev?

I’ll admit I’m not that informed in the field, but did Samsung have any controversies that caused everyone to consider it worse than Chinese-owned companies? The only negative I’m aware of is that their stuff is really overpriced.