Thanks, that sounds good. It's excellent that you keep making scripts to make the installation process even easier. I'd like to try out some more of them :)
If GOG wasn't changing so much for the worse, I'd feel less bad about re-buying Civ4. Right now... not so sure.

Found Witcher 2 though, so I'm glad about that, with saves and everything (they were indeed where you said). Apparently I had installed it on a separate harddisk back when, and the path was slightly changed now because I mounted them in /mnt instead of /media. Small things all across the board really, and as far as I can tell everything works now, with the exception of Trine 3. But that's a bit of a traincrash anyway.

One of the frustrating things with Witcher 2, that I re-remember now when looking through some files, is that it was hard to mod on linux, for the reason that a key file is simply missing. I've no idea what they've done with it, but it's gone. The only type that really works is simple XML modding and replacing of pictures/art. Not a huge deal I guess, but it was still frustrating. Didn't help to put in a copy of the missing file either, base_scripts.dzip, because the game still didn't use it.

Suffice to say, if TW3 ever makes it to Linux, I'd greatly prefer it to be a proper native version instead of a wrapper, so hopefully problems like this wouldn't exist - plus better stability and performance. But at this point I'd also just like to have it available at all. Pretty absurd that it isn't. DRM Free + Linux should be a match made in heaven (Antarctica?).

I have a question about the noatime tip you mentioned in your guide Does this only apply to the partition where Linux is installed, or can/should we do it for other partitions on the SSD? My /home folder is on the SSD as well, but I see the default options here are "defaults", which is different from where Linux is installed: errors=remount-ro,noatime.

Another question, more dangerous. This time I've utterly removed Windows, so no more dual booting (didn't do it anyway, just wasted space). But when I bought a new harddisk a couple years ago, a 2 TB one, I formatted it as NTFS so both systems could read it. Is it fine to just keep it as NTFS, or is it possible, and crucially - safe - to somehow change it to ext4? Naturally I wouldn't want to lose that data, and mostly don't have backup for it either, as much of it is games, music, videos.

Probably answered my own question there in terms of risks/rewards, but it will be good to know anyway :)

Interesting. Being off the Windows titty. How easy is it to partition an SSD C:/ for Linux Mint and run dual booting? I would like to try Linux Mint to see if I can learn to use it. But I only have one SSD drive ATM and all my games are on it. Also would using dual OS eat up a lot more resources? Any way to really foul up Win 10 by accident installing Linux Mint on same drive as Win?

You can’t do a NTFS → ext4 conversion without losing all the data on the file system.
But if at some point you happen to be in a situation where a full backup is possible, it would be a good idea to switch to ext4 format, as NTFS has a lot of limitations on Linux.

It should be fine to add noatime there as well.

You can keep it as NTFS, but as vv221 noted it's somewhat limited & doesn't store certain info (such as permissions)... if you only plan to use it for storing archives, music, videos etc. it should be fine though. If you want to use a different filesystem on the disk then you will need to move the data off the disk, then reformat it & move the data back.

It should be possible to resize Windows' C: partition on the SSD to make room for Mint. The installer has the ability to resize partitions, or you can do this from within Windows (which would also be the safest way of doing it).

Aside from the extra disk space being used, there's no difference at all in resource use when dual-booting, as only one OS will be running at a time.

There's always some risk when making big system changes so definitely make a backup of everything important before starting just in case, but as long as you don't rush things & make sure to ask about anything you don't understand first then the risk is generally quite low.

Thank you. And why Mint over the other Distro's? There are a ton of them it looks like. Is it the best for gaming?

I recommend Mint because it has great compatibility & support as it's based on Ubuntu, but includes a number of ease of use enhancements & fixes and a better default software selection.

Ubuntu and its derivatives like Mint are the most widely used on the desktop so they're the main support target for games, so in that regard they could be considered "best" as you'll generally have an easier time getting things running and if any help is needed then there's official support plus a large userbase.

Plus it's what I use :p

Cool. After reading the below, I may just do it on a 'normal' harddisk that is formatted with ext4 (320GB). I don't know if the information is still relevant, but in addition to the valid point you mention in the guide about writes and 'shelflife' on SSDs, there is the performance issues. If noatime can still save you 20% performance in certain cases, that's a HUGE deal. They also mention nodiratime, which I suppose is the same but for directories instead of files.
https://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/instant-10-20-boost-in-disk-performance-the-noatime-option/ Also, thanks to both of you for the answer to the NTFS question. Don't have the means to backup all that data now, but will it keep it in mind for later, like when I buy a new disk at some point.


About the distros:
I've tried quite a few myself, and between them I would say Linux Mint is the one that enables the easiest transition from Windows, by quite some distance tbh. Everything is basically there when you have installed Linux Mint, including codecs and such. The menu system is pretty similar to Windows, at least how Windows operated before everything became a traincrash with Windows 8 and 10. "Control panel" is similar too. It's easy to navigate around and make decisions on what matters, while not overpowering you with a million customisation options. At first I loved that about Debian, but it's a bit unnecessary and confusing. As mentioned by the others, support is also excellent, and you can usually get answers to question fairly fast on the official Mint forums.

If you want to try it out, there are Live versions, which you can run from e.g. a memory stick. It changes nothing on your computer, but you can maneuver around as if it was your proper system, even install new software and games. It's an ingenious concept tbh.

You can find the different versions here: https://linuxmint.com/download.php
I use Cinnamon, which I think is also the most popular.

Oh boy wish me luck. Not an expert by any means, but trying to learn a lot. Going dual OS here in a bit.

The information is a bit outdated, most distros now use "relatime" AFAIK (Mint certainly does at least, as I checked earlier) which limits access time updates to something like "once every 24 hours, or whenever a file is being modified anyway" (or something like that) so the performance impact should be negligible.
Good luck... when I started out with Mint I had no prior Linux experience and now 4.5 years later, Windows is gone as of my new build :) As long as you're careful & don't blindly rush things it should be fine :)

I'm trying to transition into Mint fully, mainly because upgrading hardware with Windows has been a chore. I'm still holding onto Windows and I'm having trouble dual booting Windows 7 home premium with Linux Mint 18.2.

I've tried reinstalling Linux, which was a good idea anyway because the level 5 updates I applied without knowing anything about the numbers crippled my system. I've tried reinstalling grub but that was before the fresh install so I'm going to try that again but Grub, it seems is working just fine but Windows loads by default and I have to spam the Bios key in order to get into GRUB.

By the way, Great guide. Really appreciate the work you put into it. I'll look over to see whether I could find any solutions to my problem but from what I read the problem seems to be quite common with quite a variety of solutions, which tells me that no one is quite sure what causes Windows to take over.

Any additional feedback would be appreciated.

It sounds like you just need to set the boot order in the BIOS so that the disk GRUB was installed to is first in the boot order, or at least ahead of Windows

--------------------
[This worked]
-------------------
I went into the "Disks" application.

Clicked on the Mint partition (the one that says ext4 file system) > settings button (the gears/cogs) > then I clicked on where it says Legacy BIOS bootable.

Now, it boots right into GRUB perfectly. Mint boots through GRUB perfectly as does Windows 7.

This solution is especially useful because it requires no terminal and because there's no need to fiddle with BIOS, especially when you have a BIOS that prevents you from choosing what disk to boot.

Sorry if this has already been answered, but when I put in my copy of "The Witcher" into my DVD drive I get this error,

Error mounting /dev/sr0 at /media/joe/Disk1: Command-line `mount -t "udf" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8" "/dev/sr0" "/media/joe/Disk1"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so.

I have tried going into the "disks" utility and remounting it but it doesn't seem to work. Any help resolving this would be appreciated.

Thank you

Not sure what's going on there, looks like it's having problems reading the disc (disc might be damaged?). You should be able to claim a free GOG copy of the game though, so it would be easiest to just do that & use the GOG version instead: https://www.gog.com/witcher/backup