this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Thanks for all the info. The reason I didn't want to do a clean install wasnt because I didn't want to back things up. I just knew I would forget game saves or have program settings revert to default or whatever and spend the next couple weeks slowly running into small issues with my setup.
You're welcome, and yeah growing pains every time with a new install. But you do it a little better each time.
One recommendation - when you do reinstall, don't use the default/automatic partitioning. Manually set up your /home directory as a separate partition from /root. This lets you reinstall the OS without having to touch your user files. When you reinstall again, all you have to do is select the existing /home partition to use as the new install's home (and make sure not to format it). This makes your install a lot more flexible, and your OS a lot more disposable.
If you do manual partition configuration, don't forget to also create a /swap partition that is at least 1.5x the size of your RAM.
Separating home is unnecessary these days with btrfs, Fedora for example will let you reinstall while preserving /home/.
I generally feel more comfortable having /home as a separate partition. It makes editing my partitions with external tools like gparted very easy, and I can just wipe /root whenever I like without having to think too much about. Also, are we considering btrfs to be reliable now? Last time I looked at it, it was still in the prototype/unstable phase and I chose ZFS for my server instead.
Another reason I keep /home separate is that I have systems with multiple Linux versions installed. Each has their own /root, and they share /boot, /swap and /home.
It's the default for fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, cachyos, so i'd say yes, or at least it's feature set is worth it's "unstability".
This would work just fine with mount points on btrfs, probably not on a regular distro as you can't usually customize them like this, but on a terminal based install like arch? not a problem.
Another benefit of a separate home you can keep is that a lot of linux-native programs store their preferences and other stuff in ~/.config or ~/.share, so you get the added bonus of not having to set these programs up again as well.
Pull the current Linux drive. Install Linux with encryption to the current windows drive. Put the other drive back in, copy files and settings over, then wipe it.
You could also use cryptsetup-reencrypt to encrypt the current Linux drive in place. I've done it, works great. But you should always have a backup of anything you can't afford to lose.