TL;DR -

Question 1: how bad would it be to mount a NTFS drive and continue using it in NTFS format with Linux?

Question 2: should I partition my drive to have separate / partition and /home partition if I’m planning to distro hop?

Question 3: can I make Steam use game files on my secondary NTFS HDD?

---

I’m getting fed up with Windows day by day with how slow and chuggy it is.

My initial plan to buy a new 1TB SSD for Linux is out of the window thanks to astronomical prices and I’m upset by it. So is how HDD prices are also impacted.

I have a 2TB HDD formated in NTFS because back then when I built my PC I didn’t think to try linux so I let it stay in NTFS. This drive is where all my personal files and data is. This is a separate drive from the 500GB NVME drive I use for Windows, which will be wiped for Linux.

Currently I also have an external portable SSD as a backup / working storage for my work supplied Windows laptop. I am unsure of the parity of my personal data and files is on the portable SSD with my 2TB HDD. So for the forseeable future the HDD will remain in NTFS and could not be reformated into a Linux friendlier format at the moment.

So my Question 1 is, how bad would it be to mount that NTFS HDD drive and continue using and working on it, with Linux?

---

Question 2: I haven’t actually decided really what distro to stick with. I’m in a choice paralysis between trying base Fedora, Nobara, atomic Fedora but not Bazzite, and CachyOS. Regardless what I choose I feel like I might distro hop sooner than later. So should I set a different partition for /home?

From what I understand, the advantage would be I wouldn’t have to touch my personal data when I distro hop. As I understand it I can just wipe the / partition for the OS I want try next. The disadvantage is that say moving from Fedora to Arch there could be some binaries or config files that might clash and as a noob I’d be in for a rollercoaster of fixing stuff. Am I wrong in my reading and understanding?

But if I’m already putting my personal data on a separate drive from the OS drive, I really shouldn’t be bothering with partitioning the OS drive. The other advantage that I read for having / and /home partitions is that if the system have multiple users, there’s a lot lesser risk of a user might fill the whole drive and preventing the OS to update later. So for a single user system like mine, and having a big storage size that is unlikely to happen anyways and I would only have to bother reinstalling programs every time I distro hop.

Edit: further understanding and questions related to Question 2:

2: always, even if not distro hopping. You can use a volume aware filesystem like Btrfs and have @ mounted on / and @home mounted on /home, so you don’t have to pre allocate space for one or another. Many distros will detect this setup and smartly use snapshots to revert upgrades without touching your home dir.

Interesting thing I saw yesterday when I “test run” to install Fedora KDE Plasma on a USB stick. I didn’t go through with it, but I noticed that the installer suggest to partition my drive as such:

sdc1 - format as efi - /boot/efi  
sdc2 - format as efi - /boot  
sdc3 - format as btrfs subvolume - /  
sdc4 - format as btrfs subvolume - /home  

Is that a good default? on the page that ask whether to install fedora side by side another OS, full wipe, or manual partition, I noticed that whatever drive I want to use it already have to be non Windows friendly. In my case, my nvme is in NTFS naturally, my HDD is in NTFS as well, and my test USB stick is in exfat.

---

Question 3: I have a few games that I already downloaded and install on the Windows system. I plan to move the games that’s installed on the OS drive to the secondary HDD drive, then use that files for when I install linux on the OS drive. Should I not bother with it instead and just bite the bullet and wipe the game files and download it again? or can I make it work somehow?

I have checked that my hardware peripherals such as my mic, game controller, gaming wheel and my audio card works before when I ran a live ISO, so that’s fine on that end, I hope. I don’t think I’ll encounter problems with my NVidia card; and if I do I think there’s enough help out there for me to figure it out. So really it’s these 3 big questions that I’ve thought of the more I research before moving to Linux wholesale. If I need any Windows stuff I always have my work supplied laptop. I only need Windows for work only, and I don’t use any Adobe stuff.

I’ll admit that I have asked a few AI my questions, but since my personal data is valuable I don’t trust what their answers are. So that’s why I’m making this post. I’m going to play my ESL card and say that I tried my best to convey what I have in my head as best I can. I’ll be happy to clarify further if my wording doesn’t make sense.

TIA.