After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it's time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!
You could also actually just use it. Just because it is physically located on the root disk doesn't mean you can't add some directories and give your user full access to them.
I usually have a
/mnt/scratch, usually on another disk (hence mnt). Or you could make another steam library in/opt/. Steam can have multiple data locations.The purists might yell at you, but it is your system. If you have space to spare in root use it, just remember what is where if you need/want to reinstall at some point.
Edit: or just nuke the NTFS partition, and use that partition as extra storage. Usually you don't need that much in root, and if you do you can always symlink to another dir to get around it. Just remember to copy anything that might be useful from the ntfs!
User/<foo>has a lot of data, I would copy at least that. Reading ntfs data is not a problem from linux, writing is more hit and miss.