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!
Yeah there's a fair bit outside of home people don't mention. Basically any system-level stuff: fstab mounts, all your system packages, /opt installs, config tweaks you had to do. It tales some time to get set back up after a while on the same install.
After having to reinstall a couple times myself I now don't touch anything outside of /home by hand. It's all scripted so that I can copy /home, run the script, and be back up and running. Well, theoretically, there's usually a hiccup or two. But the peace of mind knowing it's all (self) documenting is quite nice. Not for everybody of course.