Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up when filtering for English only. It’s worth noting that for all the official support Macs ever saw in gaming, they never represented anything better than about 5% of the market.
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.
I do have an edge there as I’m actually pretty technically inclined (I do tech support for living, and at the risk of sounding like touting my own horn, I’m high up the escalation path for my company). So partitions and stuff are common things I work with, and this isn’t nearly my first brush with Linux. It’s just more getting games and a bunch of small unique software working is somewhat different from working with business servers where you have either stricter policies on what gets installed or vendor backup if necessary.
Still, much of my actual work involves solving issues by looking up errors and symptoms, so figuring out the issues here aren’t that hard for me either. While I do appreciate the GUI making it an easy switch from Windows, I’m no stranger to CLI either and feel quite comfortable using it, and documentation for a lot of what I’ve messed with so far has been pretty easy to find and follow.
As for my plans, I’ll probably eventually limit NTFS to one 1tb drive, or maybe do what you said and repetition it down to maybe 500gb, and hopefully most of what I do will be in Linux. I am the type to force myself to learn by force, so I haven’t actually booted back into Windows except for an issue where I couldn’t delete the NTFS partition from Linux. And I’ll probably hardly boot into Windows going forward either.