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.

There’s a third party alternative to the Epic launcher called Heroic, works pretty great. Also apparently Roblox works with something called “Sober” – no idea what that is just regurgitating other comments.

Usually the bootloader is only on one drive regardless. Keeping them on separate physical drives can be nice for simplicity but there’s no reason you can’t put them on the same drive.

Check all the games on ProtonDB, but from what you listed that should all be pretty easy to get working on Linux. 95% of Steam games just work out of the box, with most exceptions being competitive MP games with aggressive anti-cheat. If it’s not a steam game, it’s still likely pretty easy to run, but you might have to use a third party launcher or something depending on what storefront it’s from.

It’s gonna be way less hassle to just use Linux. The gaming situation is so vastly improved from 6 or so years ago, and the vast majority of games just work, with a large amount of the rest only needing minor tweaks.

The big exceptions are in competitive gaming, and even there it’s pretty much limited to proprietary & intrusive anti-cheats that I wouldn’t have installed on my Windows computer anyway; Riot’s Vanguard and FACEIT are probably the two big ones. Also Fortnite – even though EasyAntiCheat does work fine with Linux, Epic has chosen to explicitly not support it. If you do play one of those few games – or use other proprietary software like the Adobe suite that also won’t work – a dual boot should be fine, it only takes maybe two minutes to swap over and unless you have two beefy GPUs you’ll be limited in a KVM setup.

Based on this post I’m gonna say take it slow with a dual boot or live installation, if at all. You mention a lot of IMO fairly minor and subjective look and feel type criteria that indicate that you’ll be quite bothered by minor changes. Using Linux is going to involve major changes. If you’re not willing to leave your comfort zone and relearn a few things, might as well stay on Windows.

I have no context here, but isn’t getting a similar level of pushback from the community under a second alias evidence of some of it being justified? Or did people somehow discover it was the same person and then the abuse started?

Oh, so the main reason why it’s so good?

Yeah all of the times I see Rust being described as “harder to learn” than C I just shake my head. It’s like saying that it’s easier to just fall off the cliff at the Grand Canyon instead of taking the path down. Any additional difficulty is because the language forces you to understand memory and pointers properly, instead of just letting you fuck around and find out.

Ah right, I remember being caught by that before. Fixed, thanks.

An actual WM is not a DE, and if you use something like i3 (sway is the Wayland version) all it does is manage your windows. A DE includes a WM; GNOME’s is called gdm Mutter. If you install a WM yourself, that’s all you get. Docks, bars, etc. might have suggested or sibling implementations for a given WM, but you’ll be setting them up yourself and you can easily swap in other options, or just not have them. There’s also no included software suite with things like a file manager. You’re expected to pick and use whatever tools you like, which is exactly the appeal but can be intimidating if you’re used to a full fledged DE.

Tiling is just a way of organizing your windows, as opposed to the more common “floating” scheme that all the major desktop UIs use. You can totally use tiling in a DE, you just need an extension for it. I know they exist for GNOME and I’m sure there’s a way to do it on kde too. Even Windows has tiling modes available.

So you can probably just enable tiling on your current setup to try it out (or install GNOME on your VM --i know that PopOS! used to have a built in tiling mode, but it’s been years since I tried that so ymmv). Moving to a WM instead of a DE is a very different and more involved process that’s mostly for people who want a totally custom setup with no extraneous features that they don’t explicitly set up. It’s basically the UI side of doing an LFS or classic Arch install where you pick which system components to use by hand.

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The meme is mostly a relic from the days when installing Arch was a very involved and mostly manual process – it wasn’t to the level of LFS, but you had to configure most of the base system, and it would leave you with a pretty bare-bones setup (no GUI by default, etc). So it was a pretty big hurdle and successfully installing it did give you a bit of nerd cred, though even then the “arch BTW” meme was tongue in cheek.

These days it’s just one of the most well-supported rolling release distros, and it’s got automated installers and GUI spins just like any popular distro. The two biggest assets are the AUR and the wiki.

NixOS does kind of feel like the spiritual successor in terms of effort to set up, and in that immutable OSes are kind of the next big thing, like rolling release was fairly unconventional when Arch was taking off.

I think there’s value in pushback against popular but problematic software. Some people just don’t realize that, for example, WhatsApp is owned entirely by Meta and is known to collaborate with law enforcement, which are two facts that entirely undermine its main selling point.

I’d rather gatekeep than lie to people, which is what you’re doing if you’re claiming that using Linux for gaming on your home PC doesn’t require a good amount of knowledge and a willingness to learn and fix things. If you get a steam deck or a pre built Linux gaming pc, yeah, just about anyone should be able to use those without issue. But any gamer looking to run non-steam games, or even steam games that aren’t well-supported, is going to run into edge cases and optimization issues, and not everyone wants to put in the time or effort to figure those out when Windows does most of it for you.

If you’re rebooting to fix an “fps issue”, you don’t understand what’s causing that issue. It doesn’t sound like you’re looking for advice, but to others scared off by this, this sounds a lot like a user who got in over their head and started mucking with things they shouldn’t have.

facepalm it’s not an “ad tracking component”, it’s a test of a new API that, if adopted, will let sites opt in to a much less invasive anonymized system for evaluating the effectiveness of their ads, instead of the current crazy amount of personal data they scrape. The data is anonymized in a double blind scheme, and it’s already way less data than every ad is grabbing.

All of which can be disabled.

Do you pay rent (to someone not in your family)?

https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment

Check out the second and third paragraphs in particular.

This initial implementation is just to test the actual API, so I don’t believe sites using it will be blocking the other tracking yet, but once this API is tested and starts to see adoption, the goal is replacing tracking with this anonymized attribution.