you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 40 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I’m a break hopper. If I like a distro. I’ll use it. Months and sometimes years. Then, if there’s some kind of breakage and I can’t figure it out and I decide to do a fresh install, I’m like “why not try something new”

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Makes it easy as a gamer. My only worry is all the wear from installing my games each time with the high cost of storage nowadays.

    But it’s always nice to start from scratch with a new distro and not bringing any baggage with you.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    You can always have a partition for your data separate from your boot partition. Then you just mount that on any distro you run and you're good to go. I have a drive from when I used Windows for media, and I've never reformatted it. Your distro doesn't care where data came from, as long as it can read it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 13 hours ago (2 children)

    If you're still using a data drive formatted as NTFS, and you're not using Windows anymore, it's best to change the filesystem.

    Linux NTFS drivers are pretty good, but it's still reverse engineering a proprietary filesystem. Sometimes it misbehaves.

    If you're using something like ExFAT then ignore me.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I need to switch it at some point, but it's a 4TB HDD, and my other drives are smaller. I need to delete a bunch of stuff to be able to reformat it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago

    Depending on the amount of data, you might be able to shrink the existing NTFS partition, create a partition next to it of the proper filesystem type, move the data between the partitions, delete the NTFS partition, and expand the replacement.

    But I wouldn't attempt that on ant data you care about unless you have backups. I've done things like that a lot working in the tech industry, and sometimes things just break.

  • source
  • parent