How much data do you have, and are the drives identical? Usually I do in-place conversions by taking some drives offline, creating a degraded raid on them, migrating the data, then wiping the remaining drives and bringing them online in the new raid.

Works for zfs pools too, but you can't create a pool with missing drives, you have to create a temporary block device then mark it offline, then replace it with the real drive once it's free.

Unless there is an easy way to convert a DrivePool to mergerfs etc.

If I understood right, it's just software joining together multiple NTFS drives. When you open in another os it's just a normal NTFS drive

You could take two drives and create a raid1 (right? Or yolo without redundancy?) btrfs array. Move stuff from one drive, when it's empty, format it as btrfs and add it to the array. Repeat for every drive.

But....

With this much data I wouldn't risk if you don't have experience with btrfs via cli

True, People can be obnoxious. But you should still try it at some point, there is something to the hype.

The Linux community seems to me more open than ever before. Possibly due to the influx of new users who's job is not to administer Linux systems.

I wouldn't be too afraid to ask questions. Linux systems are nowadays quite simple to setup and you shouldn't have much problems with getting a simple question replied to.

don't give up :)

at first i tried to get Bazzite (didn't even install), then Mint (apparently it doesn't work well on dual monitors), and what finally worked was CachyOS, and i've been cruising on it for a few months now

Hey man, I frequently post to selfhost and I get nervous everytime thinking someone is gonna berate me, only to be met with support and guidance. I'd give it a try again, and if you encounter issues then post in the Linux comm, Selfhost, or even a more general place like asklemmy.

If someone's an asshole, ignore them, cause they're a sad excuse of a human being.

Try sticking with a simple distro like Mint, Fedora (Silverblue and Bazzite work too), or even Zorin.

Do you know what specifically went wrong?

Which games, out of curiosity?

I'm also curious what games you're talking about. Most work even without official support. The games that don't are multiplayer where the AC specifically blocks Linux, which are basically just EA games and Chinese games.

One interesting thing I've found is that legacy windows support is better on Linux through WINE/Proton than on Windows. Old games are more likely to be runnable on Linux than Windows.

Dual boot . You can install most distros non destructively side by side in your current partition. Ubuntu even makes it point and click on install.