Switch to Linux theory best practice

[Psittac]

I just commented on someone else's post about switching to Linux as a daily and it gave me some ideas on how to do this myself.  IME I find it easiest to have both windows and linux available at the same time, I also mentioned that being able to wipe an install and start over is crucial, at least for my habits.

 

I got to thinking and I have a small nvme drive that I could add for a linux install and I can dual boot.  But it doesn't have enough space for the games I want to play.  My aha moment was... what if I put a network drive for all of my games which will solve two problems.  First it will keep me from needing my large windows nvme drive for gaming and second it will give me persistence of game downloads if I bork my linux install which I am prone to do.

 

Are there other best practices you would recommend for switching over to Linux as a daily?  I just wanted to open this subject up to best practices not just a specific solution to someone's particular interests

[Potatoes__]

When dualbooting, you can just auto-mount the NTFS drives you have with Windows games and import them to your Linux Steam library, no need to re-download anything. There are many guides available and I can't find the exact one I was following back then but this looks good: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows. Make sure to follow the part that addresses NTFS read errors and once the discs are auto-mounted you can import the games library to Steam. 

 

Some people advise against it citing "some" issues with NTFS on Linux but I've never heard anything specific on why it is actually wrong and personally had zero issues with it, so I don't get those warnings and believe they are leftovers from the times when NTFS driver was still under development. Still have part of my games shared between Windows and Linux in case I want to compare the performance or stability. This setup has been a huge plus when I was still getting familiar with Linux and I doubt that I would move at all if I had to reformat every single drive I have and move all of my stuff around. The only trouble I ever had with this is that Civ VI of all games refused to work until I moved it to Linux ext4 partition and there is an I/O speed penalty, but that's not really meaningful for the most of the games.

 

In the long run if you get comfortable with it and feel OK to just nuke your Windows install then you can just move everything over to Linux filesystem and be done with it, but while you are learning it is alright to have both.

 

Just don't be a silly person and always back up important data no matter what you do to your PC, don't YOLO it 

[Potatoes__]

Just to add a few more from my personal experience:

 

1) Dualboot is the way to get familiar with Linux no matter what others say. You don't have to go full ham and fully move right away, and it is not reasonable to expect that a person would have a good time in a new OS right from the start. Dualboot gives you a safety net as you can move back to Windows the moment something goes so wrong that you cannot do something important with your PC in a reasonable amount of time. With time and practice you'll feel less and less need to boot back to winslops and it will remain as a "just in case" OS until you decide to wipe it completely. Some people would suggest using Live USB to try Linux out but in my opinion they are only useful to make very general assessment of how stuff works or to check out a different desktop environment. Any potential issues and difficulties that come with dualboot are mostly solvable and the convenience of this setup is totally worth it.

 

2) When dualbooting make sure to have a separate /boot partition to handle the bootloader that comes with your distro, instead of rewriting or relying on Windows bootloader. Otherwise a random Windows update can break it and you won't be able to boot into your Linux install and would have to repair the bootloader through Live USB. Actually I'm not sure if it is possible today but I had problems with it years ago.

 

3) A silly one - keep a text file or a Google Sheet or something to document the tweaks and fixes you do on Linux. Like if you have some issue with a game and manage to fix it or had to play around with Wine to get some windows app running - write it down. If (or rather when) you start distro hopping or have to re-install your OS you won't have to scratch your head trying to remember every little tweak you did before. It saved me a lot of time.

 

4) Mentioned this earlier but make backups a habit, better safe than sorry. Games can be reinstalled but important documents and personal files are irreplaceable, you'll have nobody but you to blame if something goes wrong and you end up with a wiped or damaged drive. But, in addition to this common sense also check out Timeshift - it makes system backups. Say you are playing around with your current distro or trying some new one and end up completely borking everything - just restore the backup and your system is back to the state it was in before you did a funny. Helped me a great deal when I was testing other distros and wanted to revert to my "seems better" Kubuntu install.