Maybe you can help me. I would just like to dabble in it. Can I duel boot from the same drive my windows is in? can it access my storage drives as is, or do I have to completely reformat those and dedicate them to linux?
You can dual boot but would highly recommend that you have a separate Windows SSD. Microsoft likes to dick around with the boot loader and bricking the ability to dual boot.
I am still dual booting myself with a small SSD for the rare occasion I want to run a game that isn’t supported on Linux but honestly I haven’t done that in over half a year now so Windows just kinda sits they taking to 200 GB of space.
You can run games from your windows drives but it’s better not to, it can cause weird issues because of the way files are stored (case sensitive vs insensitive, permissions etc.)
One other point: if you just want to dabble, you don’t actually need to install Linux. Many (if not most) Linux distributions can be booted from a USB drive as what they call a “Live USB”.
Maybe you can help me. I would just like to dabble in it. Can I duel boot from the same drive my windows is in? can it access my storage drives as is, or do I have to completely reformat those and dedicate them to linux?
You can dual boot but would highly recommend that you have a separate Windows SSD. Microsoft likes to dick around with the boot loader and bricking the ability to dual boot.
I am still dual booting myself with a small SSD for the rare occasion I want to run a game that isn’t supported on Linux but honestly I haven’t done that in over half a year now so Windows just kinda sits they taking to 200 GB of space.
I’m out of rack space for another drive but I guess I can try on a portable one.
Would steam be able to see my existing games or do I have to redownload them?
You can run games from your windows drives but it’s better not to, it can cause weird issues because of the way files are stored (case sensitive vs insensitive, permissions etc.)
Your windows drive would be fine, Linux side you’d need to download then again.
One other point: if you just want to dabble, you don’t actually need to install Linux. Many (if not most) Linux distributions can be booted from a USB drive as what they call a “Live USB”.
Here’s how to do it for Ubuntu: https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows
The process is similar for other distros. I tried several this way before I decided to install one that I really liked.
It is better to install it on separate drives and use bios to select the drive you want to boot from.