So I’ve been putting this off all summer, but with support nearly ending for Win 10 and finally having a weekend to spend on this, and absolutely refusing to move to win 11, I’m finally pulling the trigger and getting this done.
I run a home built AMD rig with a 5800x and RT 7800xt, so as I understand, drivers shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve got 3 storage drives currently, a 1tb m.2 NVME I use for the OS and games I need to run quicker, and 2 SATA SSDs. I’ve also got a much larger external HDD which I’ll use to back up my entire windows environment (which I’ll disconnect after it’s backed up) just in case things go sideways during this process.
My biggest concern is here is moving all of my music, pictures, and docs over after the migration. Is it as simple as copying everything over from the NTFS win10 backup HDD to my newly formatted ext4 drives outside of the OS partition? I’m sure I’m not completely phrasing this correctly, since my understanding of Linux is currently at about a 4th grade level, and is probably why I’ve been running around in circles trying to find answers without much luck. I did go over the Mint install docs, but it seems a little light on details for my particular concern.
If there are any resources, suggestions or advice anyone could offer here to help me get through this, I gladly thank you in advance.
Edit: I think I have the information I need to make this work (at least for now), I just want to thank everyone here for taking the time to reply to this. I sincerely appreciate it!
I see you already got the answers you need, so I just came to welcome you to the linux community, and wish you good luck.
In the beginning, it will be a bit hard, because changing things we’re used to is always hard, but give it some time, and you get the long-term benefits, which, in my opinion, are very worth it. Among a few things, you will experience no arbitrary interruptions to your device usage, will have lower hardware requirements, your devices will last longer, will have to deal with much less bullshit, and will even have more free time (unless you become one who likes to spend time tinkering with the system lol)
Thanks! It’s not even a hardware issue for me, I pretty much overbuilt this rig. It’s way more than capable of running 11. For me, it’s more of a “I’m done with MS’ BS” at this point.
Probably not really relevant for you specifically, but if anyone else is reading this who is thinking about making the change, then I want to say that they should work on switching to open source applications that have linux versions first. Typically the biggest challenge is in switching those apps that we use a lot. Already having switched to those apps and only having to learn a new OS makes everything a ton easier.
You can leave these as NTFS, but you never know if the linux ntfs driver might do something wrong during a write operation (during reading is usually safe, but in writing operations there could be problems).
I’ll reformat the drives to the suggested ext4, that part’s fine. I was worried about whether or not I’d have to somehow convert all of the files going from the NTFS windows backup to the ext4 drives, but the other comment here said just copying them over would work.
Thank you for the reply!
As someone similarly unfamiliar with Linux I’ll say I just made the move as well a few weeks ago and haven’t had any issues so far! Ive even started playing with wine and lutris to get games working, with a little tweaking I was even able to drag the files of an already installed game from Windows over to Linux and then get lutris to run it. I was pretty surprised to see it worked lol
Welcome to the club. I switched about a year ago and its been fine.
Mind you, I was a windows power user and I Linux I’m just a below average minimalist user, but its been fine. Also mind you, I run a windows VM for some stuff I’m still tethered to (virt-manager is your friend if this is the case). But I have 3 machines in my house that are all Mint boxes and its smooth sailing.
There are some things I wish were different, but you need to choose your battles. Like I don’t want any kernel based anticheat on my system so those kinds of games I play on console if available, or don’t play at all.
As far as advice, part of what I like about Mint is their forum. Yes, you can always search and find answers but with so many variances between distros having a forum tailored to your specific OS is a nice perk. You will find a lot of answers there.
Hot tip: read up on file permissions, users and groups. Permissions aren’t inherited like they are in windows so that’s a mental adjustment you need to make.
You’ll probably pick up on the file structure fairly quickly. Though I didn’t unhide the hidden folders in my home directory because I needed to (I forger why but it came up)
And honestly, I’ve used an AI tool to help walk me through getting some stuff to work (somehow I broke my Samba sharing) so that’s always a resource to help guide you and troubleshoot.
Great decision to move to GNU/Linux. I used Mint and recommend it as first distro for a Windows begginer. I always use a USB stick for back-up. Enjoy the journey!
@BurningRiver just copy it into your home folder. If you make an own partition for home it is unaffected by reinstalling the os if necessary.
