Probably gonna keep my desktop running win10 by then because I’ll hopefully have a new desktop by then that I can easily set up Linux on. Got too much on my desktop to move over and I certainly don’t know any tools able to make the process any easier.
Probably gonna just use it as an experimental PC that I can test out server related things on.
You could just add another hard drive, install Linux on it, than access all your files on the old hard drive exactly where they are.
If nothing else, I might look into something like that.
I’m adding debian to the drive on a ten plus year old laptop as we speak. It’s taking forever because I have to do part of it manually but usually it takes less than an hour and is mostly idiot proof (my current project is on its 3rd week so I am just a special kind of idiot) but a small lightweight distro alongside the windows partition is an easy way to give old hardware new life without migrating data.
I would add a small partition, but I’m always anxious about stuff like that because I seemingly always hear things about windows messing with Linux partitions and breaking dual boot. That, and I am running out of space on my 1TB drive it came with. Two or three years of me using it thinking that I’ll never fill it up before I upgrade computers and suddenly I have to worry.
