Hello,

I am currently using a dual boot Windows 10 + Manjaro KDE.

Right now i’m using Windows for gaming and Manjaro for pretty much everything else (Development, music production, web surfing, text editing, etc.).

Seeing that gaming on linux is way more accessible than before with to proton, and that the end of life of windows 10 is in roughly a year, I would like to use linux for pretty much everything (including gaming) and keep Windows on the side, as an emergency solution in case something goes wrong.

To do that, i would like to reorganize the partitions, but I am unsure of the safest way to do it.

Right now, my disks look like this :

> lsblk -f 
NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL          UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                    
├─sda1 ntfs         Recovery tools F65647105646D153                                    
├─sda2 vfat   FAT32 SYSTEM         A848-DA23                             969,9M     3% /boot/efi
├─sda3                                                                                 
├─sda4 ntfs         Windows        388E60108E5FC4D2                                    
└─sda5 vfat   FAT32                3171-9208                                           
sdb                                                                                    
├─sdb1                                                                                 
├─sdb2 ntfs         New Volume     5CF414E0F414BE68                                    
└─sdb3 ext4   1.0                  52d29b2c-8d6d-4ed6-b6eb-5d31e292c14b   17,8G    81% /
sdc                                                                                    
└─sdc1 ntfs         TOSHIBA EXT    6630DF0630DEDC5D                                    
sr0                                                                                    
> lsblk /dev/sda              
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 238,5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   500M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0  1000M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda3   8:3    0   128M  0 part 
├─sda4   8:4    0 235,9G  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0  1000M  0 part 
> lsblk /dev/sdb    
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sdb      8:16   0 931,5G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0    16M  0 part 
├─sdb2   8:18   0 803,5G  0 part 
└─sdb3   8:19   0   128G  0 part /

sda is a ~200 Gb SSD and sdb a 1Tb HDD. The windows partition is on sda4 and the manjaro partition is on sdb3, meaning that windows takes about 10s to launch while manjaro takes 1 or 2 minutes. To fix this, I would like to move my Manjaro partition on sda, alongside windows.

My best guess to do this would be to :

  1. Backup all important data from windows and Manjaro (on an external hard drive)
  2. Use window’s partition tool to create a partition for Manjaro on sda
  3. Install Manjaro on sda
  4. Reorder the sdb partitions to clear the old Manjaro data

Can something go wrong with this method ? And what are the partitions I should ABSOLUTELY do not modify ?

As a subsidiary question, I am wondering if Manjaro KDE is a good distro for my needs.

I have been using for about two years so far with no major issue, but I have heard that for some people this ditro can break pretty easily. That being said, I use almost no package from the AUR, so maybe that’s why ?

Do you have any recommendations regarding distros for mainly dev/gaming? And is it possible to put KDE on it easily ? I like the way it feels/looks

Anyway, thank you if you have any advice or opinion on this.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I’m no expert so take this with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

    You should be able to install KDE on whatever distribution you decide. If you want KDE 6, you may have to add a repo, but it should be as simple as sudo <package manager install incantation> whatever-KDE-is-named-in-the-repo

    If you want stability, Debian is the go to, but the tradeoff there is older packages. However if manjaro is working for you, don’t fix what isn’t broken. I don’t know how good Debian is for gaming, but honestly any distribution should be just fine for dev. Considering what steam has done with Arch as the base, it may be worth considering Arch as an option.

    To the partitions, I’m not knowledgeable enough to make recommendations as to what you should or shouldn’t touch. My instinct is to not touch /boot/efi

    Something can definitely go wrong when playing with partitions, so make that backup of everything as planned and test it before you make any changes to the system.

    • waterproofOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Thank you for your answer !

      I was looking at pop os, and apparently KDE can be installed the way you suggested, however that might create some instabilities, that’s why I slightly prefer distributions that have KDE by default.

      I guess i’ll stick to Manjaro then. It’s probably not perfect, but I like it.

      Thanks for the advice on the partition. If i’m correct, I won’t have to modify anything besides sda4 and sdb3, so I guess I should be fine