Sorry for not replying, I re-asked the question on the linux mint forums since I didn't want to spam this topic with bumps and got my answer there so I forgot about my post here.

I got to boot into W7 by going into my BIOS and selecting my SSD drive and later changed it to give it boot priority since I'm mostly using that for now, whenever I want to go into Mint I just go to BIOS and select my HDD. Not the most elegant solution I know but for now I'm fine having both things working like that.

Thanks to both of you for replying!

(GOG forum search didn't find anything)

Goofing with Mint 19.3. Trying HL2 for a test.

It has sluggish/sliding/molasses-patch style movement problems and a white border on the right and bottom sides of the screen. Your guide mentioned enabling "Disable compositing for full-screen" in the Mint Settings>General, so I did that and it appears to be much faster but it is no longer true full-screen but has the title-bar of the game (with the minimize/close buttons) and Mint's main bottom bar showing.

Advise?

Edit: FO3 is working fine according to your guide. Glad to say.

I've had that happen with some games before, but it didn't always happen & restarting the affected games usually corrected it. I haven't had it happen with any games for a long time though, but I'll reinstall & check HL2 here later.

Did you make sure to add the relevant PPA for your graphics card & install the newest available graphics drivers?

I want to install Linux Mint and use it as my main OS dual-booted with an offline Windows 7 for those games that don't run on Linux.

I've only ever used a Red Hat distro in college way back in the early 2000s, so bear with my newbish questions.

So, if I currently have and SSD with 2 partitions C and D, one for Windows 7 itself and one where I install all my games and programs. If I want to install Linux Mint on it while keeping all my current files on it intact, should I create a new partition before installation? Or do I do it during installation process?

I also have and HDD (drive E) which I use for storage: photos, documents... etc. Is there anything I have to do during installation to have it available from both Windows and Linux?

Thanks.

Best way for me is to do the partition stuff on Windows 7 and then install Linux Mint. I find kinda harder (or more work) to do it backwards.
There is some stuff I feel more confortable with on Windows than Linux, namely to expand or reduce portitions wich already have a operating system installed. I do it many times when cloning hard drives for a bigger size.

Your second HDD has nothing to do with Linux install but follow the instalation process (the choice process, not the file copy itsel) closelly as a small error can lead to wipe out an entire storage drive.
As you probably already know, partitions are not called C: or D: in Linux, and to help I usually do partition with diferent sizes so it's easier to not do wrong.

If you want just drop some prints here and some one with enough experience will help :D

So I can just create a new partition, assign letter L to it or whatever, then during installation choose it as the one to install Linux on?

Partitions on Linux don't have the drive letters, but you still see the same partitions, is that right? So if I do nothing to my HDD drive, it will still be seen as a separate disk on Linux?

Usually the physical drives are called sda and sdb
The partitions of a drive are sda0, sda1 etc...

Linux Mint will also show more partitions than Windows because Windows hide several partitions, like the boot partition or eventually the recovery partition.

You can indeed just create a partition and install Linux Mint there, just follow the on-screen instructions.

Thanks. I'll be back on Sunday and will be installing it then.

Actually, one more question.

So, say I create say a 30GB partition for Linux Mint, which should be enough for the OS and swap. If I do that, would I be able to have my Linux games share the partition where my Windows games are installed? Basically I'll have

Windows OS (50GB)
Linux OS (30GB)
Installed Windows and Linux games (200+GB)

Will the above work? Or do I need to create a separate partition for Linux games?

Also, regarding desktop environments, what's the difference between Cinnamon and Mate? I'm looking for something that's similar to Windows XP or Windows 7 with Classic Shell. NOT Windows 10 nor anything that seems to be geared towards touchscreen/mobile devices.

I've read that Cinnamon is based on GNOME3, which is more "touchscreeny", while Mate is based on GNOME2, which was more classic? Is that correct? I've looked at a few screenshots, but it's difficult to tell the difference from them.

When I had installed Mint to try it out, I chose Xfce as the desktop flavor exactly based on that criteria. I wanted something very lightweight and as close to earlier Windows versions (pre win8) as possible. You can check out some screenshots on the official webpage.
I am by no means an experienced linux user so others here may be more helpful on the matter :)

PS. I would LOVE to use linux as my main OS but two things keep me on Windows:
-support for games
-MS Visual Studio (I have tried CodeBlocks, CodeLite, but they didn't manage to convince me... and I'm derailing here)

Not sure about the core difference of both desktops but only used Mate on a old Atom powered netbook, wich cinnamon was a little harder to run (keep in mind I had a freaking hard time getting the GPU to render anything on that system to the point of "don't care, just use the CPU", it was a n2600 Cedar Trail part with some odd PowerVR GPU that only worked on some specific Kernel, that were I learned about changing kernel versions :D ).
Ever since that time only used Cinnamon and is enough "Classic Shelly" for me (I do use Classic Shell on my Win 8.1 laptop and desktop). Cinnamon definitely work nice with touch screen enable and look way more modern.... Also the Start Menu right-click to uninstall programs is great.

About the games partition, I believe it's alright to have both OS games on the same partition but someone with more experience in that regard may confirm.

The installer is able to resize partitions, but it's best/safest to resize them using Windows. Once the existing partitions have been resized you can let Mint create its partitions in the free space.

It should be detected & show up in the file manager automatically.

On Linux everything is represented on a single file system, e.g. on my system I have an SSD and 2 HDDs.

The SSD is where Mint is installed to and has been mounted as the filesystem root: /
The larger HDD has been mounted as: /mnt/hdd
The smaller HDD has been mounted as: /mnt/hdd2

I have manually set the mount points for the HDDs; any additional drives will usually be mounted under /media/<user>/ by default

There's more information about this in section 7 of my guide.

You will need to use a partition formatted with a Linux filesystem for Linux software, as Windows' filesystems are more limited & don't store certain important information, such as executable flags.

Also just about any character is allowed for file/directory names on Linux except / and null (although individual pieces of software and scripts may not be able to handle more "exotic" characters).

It's personal preference really... they're both similar. MATE is lighter than Cinnamon, but both are lighter than Windows. Cinnamon is a lot more customisable though IIRC.

I use Cinnamon with the "traditional" themes preset, which should be what you're after or close to it at least (you can tweak it further via System Settings --> Themes if not). This preset can selected via the Welcome Screen, under First Steps -> Desktop Layout.

So... having an ntfs hdd/partition with photos, documents... etc that's shared between Linux and Windows is OK? But if I actually install games/programs on it I should use a Linux file system instead?

Yes (also in addition to the above, Windows filesystems will be a bit slower and case sensitivity may be an issue with Linux software as Linux file systems are case-sensitive while Windows file systems aren't)