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!
It will take some reading but this sounds like a good long-term solution. Perhaps LVM should be the default. And there should be a live USB GUI method that would make the process less scary and safer. Thanks.
Oops. I had a wrong command there at the start on text, vgcreate is for creating volume group, not lvcreate. I edited it. That would just be a syntax error of sorts, nothing would happen with a wrong command.
USB GUI method is called 'installer' ;) Messing around with partitions is inherently a dangerous thing to do, no matter if you use a GUI or CLI. Today tools like fdisk or parted are pretty good at protecting yourself from yourself, but it's still just one wrong command and your partition table is broken which will be a pain in the rear to fix.
About the default setting, there's plenty of reasons to not choose LVM, even if it is pretty neat. For example if you have a smaller drive on a laptop it usually doesn't add much to even have multiple partitions at all. And also LVM has a small overhead compared to 'raw' partitions, so if you need to squeeze the last drop of disk-io out of the system LVM might not be the right choise. Or you might prefer zfs or brtfs. All solutions have their own pros and cons.