Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before). I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc. things like that. Those things have good substitutes from what I’ve read, so not an issue. But my son plays video games like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Roblox, Minecraft, Stellaris, Slime Rancher… and from what I’ve seen it’s kind of difficult to game comfortably (stable) on Linux. As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu. Currently on Windows 10 Home. Looking forward to what you guys have to say. All advice welcome. Thanks.
I don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I don’t want to start a new one for a related question. I understand I will probably have to wipe or partition my primary drive, but will I be able to use my other drives as-is, and have access to all of my files and things?
Yes. But in terms of gaming Steam seems to have problems if your games are on an NTFS (Windows filesystem) partition. Everything else should work.
It says they do but they kinda mostly don’t. I’m playing from linux on my old steam windows folder on a very much NTFS drive and I never had an issue.
I think for the mos part it’s fine, but Windows doesn’t seem to like sharing NTFS drives. So keeping an old NTFS drive with all your games is generally not a problem, but sharing an NTFS game drive between Windows and Linux sometimes causes issues.
Depending on the distro, Linux may or may not be able to write to NTFS volumes out of the box.
The proper way to share drives between Windows and Linux is to format them to ExFAT.
NTFS drives can be used by both Windows and Linux (you might need to install a driver for the latter but most user-friendly distros include them out of the box). So yes, if you have storage drives you’ll still be able to access them from both sides.
There can be weird issues sometimes with this setup, usually as a result of Windows freaking out because Linux modified some file, but it’s rarely anything severe. Personally I just flipped all my drives to Linux filesystems because they’re nicer for several purposes and I am actively trying to avoid ever using Windows again at this point.