After nine months of not having booted my Windows even once, I think it's time to wipe the Windows related partitions once and for all and claim the space. The problem is I think the way my partitions are structured, it may not be that easy. I am assuming everything other than the two ext4 partitions will have to go. What do you think? r/linux4noobs -
Someone even suggested I nuked the whole thing and started again, which would be the absolute last resort and only when I ran out of space.
EDIT: In the end, having considered all replies, I decided to go with a compromise. I wiped the NTFS partitions and made an ext4 out of the unallocated space. Then, I moved /home to that new, larger partition and if it all continues working for a day or two, I will wipe the old and smaller /home, which is not mounted now anyway, and use it for storage. This allocation will last me for ages until I have to reinstall the OS, at which point I will use the opportunity to tidy things up. I thought this was not the time to break my system moving partitions. There were some hairy moments (eg when a UUID changed quietly and the system failed to start) but overall it was OK.
Thanks to everyone for the help. This thread was very educational and I hope others will find it useful too. As a sidenote, I posted the same question to a much bigger subreddit and I received very few responses and little help. So, the much smaller Lemmy wins hands down!
Boot a live image from USB, copy /home to a separate physical disk preserving ownerships and permissions, and save anything from the windows partitions that you want you keep. Once you've verified the copy is good delete all the original partitions on the screenshot.
From here you install from scratch. You'll appreciate it later when things aren't a jumbled mess.
If you have any kind of ssd install the OS to that instead, then use that spinning drive for /home. If you have two ssd drives do /home on the second one and use the spinning one for longer term storage like music or videos or the like.
Also don't put your swap partition on an ssd, use the spinning drive for it so you're not wearing out the ssd. You can do a swap file instead of a partition if you miss the windows way. 😆
I agree with this approach. It results in the cleanist install that does not require setting up everything from scratch.
You can even backup your / as well if you want to copy some configs from the current install.