I just did this with my desktop pc when I added a second drive for additional storage. Instead of using it as additional storage for windows like I initially intended, I decided to dual boot with Mint on the second drive.
So far, I haven’t had any issue with gaming on Mint, either! Granted, most of the games I play are through Steam and either work with Proton or are native Linux to begin with. I did install a few games with Lutris, though, and works fine so far. Sea of Thieves, Astroneer, Slay the Spire, Deep Rock Galactic, are all working out of the box.
Only thing I haven’t attempted yet are multiplayer games with active anti-cheat, like LoL or CS:2. If those are the sorts of games you regularly play, you’ll probably be better off in the Windows partition/drive, but have fun experimenting in Linux!
Main game rn is BG3. And ofc want to get back into playing modded Skyrim. There are definitely other, pc only games that are on my list, coming from a Mac. But nothing like LoL or CS:2
I plan to look into this ofc, but if the games are on an external hd, would Linux use the same files as Windows? I.e. you don't need two copies of the game so long as it's on a format like NTFS that both can read? Was wondering whether to partition the external HD to have a Windows side and then a Linux side, with the latter formatted to ext4
In theory you should be able to do that! I think Proton has some issues with NTFS, mostly when installing or updating, but with a little research and tweaking you should be able to get it to run smoothly. I opted to keep them fully separate and just installed certain games twice, but am also using this as a test run before diving into full daily driver Linux when I build a new system in the spring, so longevity of my storage drives wasn’t a concern.
I think that's where I'm at, too, where I don't mind have to re-do certain things down the road if I switch approaches or commit to a certain direction
So it’s a “gaming” machine with only integrated graphics, in a small and presumably not-that-well-cooled, albeit retro, case? I don’t see the appeal, and the article reads like ad copy, not a genuine opinion.
That is a good option as well, but for experienced users only and only if you have a lot of RAM and a UPS (or on a laptop with a working battery). Otherwise, power failiures mess that thing up.
NTFS is the standard for Windows. Nowadays Linux can handle reading/writing NTFS pretty well, but you should probably use the very established ext4 or maybe btrfs for its partition.
For Linux, if you’re a beginner, EXT4. Experienced users - BTRFS.
And ntfs-3g is even better at writing on NTFS than Windows is. There are fragmentation examples online, Windows makes a fragmented mess while ntfs-3g takes great care regarding fragmentation. Plus reads/writes a lot faster than Windows does.
Yep, use NTFS. You can access it in both Windows and Linux. You’ll need to install ntfs-3g in Linux. It comes bundled in most mainstream distros, but just in case.
Sound great and I went the same way for a while. Just be aware that steam on Linux can have issues with ntfs partitions. So I also went the the two drive route, much less of a headache.
Don’t opt for an LTS distro for gaming (or even for regular desktop use), opt of a rolling release one… or at least one that has 2 or 3 regular yearly releases.
I’ve used Debian before on my gaming laptop (nvidia card), but drivers were enough of a pain that I just switched to Mint. As much as Canonical annoys me, drivers have been much more plug-and-play for me on Ubuntu downstreams than on raw Debian.
or you could use DuckDuckGo, its https://duckduckgo.com/bangs?q= lets you directly search on a website you want. searching “Beatles !mb” will redirect you to MusicBrainz’ search results, for example.
Firefox has keyword bookmarks which is basically identical to bangs but you can customize them to your preference and they don’t require sending your query to a third-party remote service.
Just set the “Keyword” option in a bookmark and type mykeyword foo in the URL bar to search using your bookmark mykeyword. I use a lot of one-character keywords such as m for https://www.google.ca/maps?q=%s, g for https://www.google.com/search?q=%s, d for https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=%s and similar. I also have a keyword e which runs a bookmarklet that fills in a one-time email into the currently focused input field.
IDK, maybe I have a particularly bad memory but it is basically as easy for me to bookmark a URL as it is to lookup and remember a bang that they defined. Plus local will always be faster, more private and more secure.
I did once manage to mount an external USB NTFS drive to a VirtualBox-hosted copy of Windows 7 and was actually able to defrag it. I assume I also ran a quick disk check before that, but it was a long time ago now.
Before I did it, I backed up everything important off the drive to another location just in case. I'd recommend you do the same.
As to how I did it, I'm afraid I don't remember, but it can't have been that difficult. There may have been some kind of raw mount option in the virtualisation software.
The other potential obstacle is the fact that things have moved on since I did it. Newer Windows / NTFS might be not be as easy to fool into accepting a drive over weird virtualisation pathways. Or the virtualisation software might not allow it as easily or at all.
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