This is me. I've always been too lazy to switch (I have some of the worst hardware for it. I'm running my old surface pro into the ground and have hardly any internal storage so hard to dual boot for testing).
But now, well hey, Windows 11 is stupid, windows 10 has been spying since forever.
Linux it is, thanks Microsoft for giving me the push I needed.
I'm trying but the girlfriend refuses. She watches YouTube on the TV and does everything else on her phone; literally only uses the laptop to play The Sims 4 (which her 1080ti can handle just fine), yet she's convinced that she will need a brand new gaming machine with a 4090/5090 as soon as Microsoft dumps WIn10. She's afraid that she'll completely break the OS if she switches to Linux. (Which is plausible, though unlikely.
I'm hoping she'll change her mind as soon as she realizes just how much more GPUs cost these days, especially mobile ones.
Create a live USB stick and demonstrate it to her, without deleting Windows. Bonus points if you rice the fuck out of it with some kawaii shit for your GF and make Sims 4 work with Wine.
Proton is based on Wine, when people say Wine in a gaming context, there's a decent chance they just mean Proton. Also there's absolutely no need for gaming distros in this situation, gaming works out of the box on any (semi-normal) distro, the most you'll have to do is flick a switch in Steam.
Edit: Or in this case with the Sims install Lutris I guess, since it's an EA game, but that also isn't much more difficult
That's fair, I'm a bit uninformed on wine and proton's roots. However I'd argue that for someone like OPs girlfriend, a somewhat-immutable atomic based distro like bazzite might be better. Especially if it's only used for gaming and YouTube 🤷♂️
But different strokes for different folks, so perhaps they'd be better off just installing steam on their distro of choice 👍
It's called dual-booting, and yes there are so many tutorials availiable. But you have to be a little more careful in that process. I do dualboot but almost never uses windows. I have heard situation where windows updates messing linux installs on same drive. The safest route might be to do what others suggested but it is possibe to install that way. Be careful with partitioning and formatting. You also have to determine the sizes for each partitions yourself too
Actually, Linux does support NTFS, although you won't be able to run executables from it. I suggest getting an external HD/SSD to make a backup of all of your drives, then proceed with the switch to Linux.
I always had a fat32 partion available for sharing stuff when i did dualbooting. Just for saving some stuff, but limited to 4 gb files then. Ntfs works as well so either partion or separate drive
Are you just wanting to back up save files? I agree with the other person here, just backup the files that matter to you onto an external drive and then install Linux