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!
Generally, it's as simple as just deleting the Windows NTFS partition. I would leave the others for now. Depending on how you installed your distro they may be related to your Linux installation. Deleting them could prevent you from booting into your Linux installation.
I'm not as familiar with UEFI as BIOS, but I believe UEFI uses a FAT formatted partition for booting into the OS proper.
You may need to adjust the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS afterwards to get it to boot back to Linux afterwards, but that is fairly uncommon in my experience.
The most likely issue you might run into is accidentally wiping your active Linux partition instead of the Windows one.
I would make backups and have your distros install disk handy before you wipe the partitions.
Afterwards, you can resize your linux root to include the now free space or move your home directory to the new partition after formatting it. Your call.
I am happy to leave the fat32 partitions alone, and deleting the first two NTFS partitions and merging them is easy. What troubles me is how to move the new big partition next to /home so that I can merge them. I hadn't considered using creating an LVM to merge them logically. It sounds less risky for a newbie if I find how to do it.