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.
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: