Lippy

Yep, you can delete your Windows partition once you no longer need it or any data within it. Then once you update your bootloader (usually GRUB, some distros do this automatically when updating the system), Windows will disappear from the boot options.

Then you can either create a new partition in its place to store data on, or extend an existing partition to fill the empty space.

I’d recommend also backing your data as a precaution in case something goes awry.

If you have a spare drive on your PC I’d recommend trialling Linux on that. With that setup, you will have it dual booted with your existing Windows installation. It should help with the transition since you can just boot into Windows if you still need it for anything. That will give you time to get accustomed to Linux while still having that Windows safety net for a while.

Also if you later find that Linux isn’t for you then it’s easy to undo that, since all you will need to do is boot into your Windows drive instead.

I went with that strategy when I made the jump 4 years ago, and later dropped Windows entirely when I built my new PC a few months later since I realised I didn’t need it at all.

Nova Lake was always planned to be a late 2026 release according to a leaked Dell roadmap.

We were supposed to get Arrow Lake Refresh for desktops later this year but this was cancelled. So while the headline is technically correct, it’s not because Nova Lake is delayed.

Not only that, but hundreds of millions of PCs can’t ‘just upgrade’ because Microsoft has arbitrarily blocked them from doing so without resorting to hacks in order to bypass those blocks.

The turning point was when Windows was no longer set and forget. Windows 7 was the last time that was the case before I had to put any real work into it.

I put up with Windows 10 for a bit and wrote a script to neutralise bloat and configure the OS to some saner settings, then I could keep things consistent between installations. That was fine for a while.

But over time Microsoft became more unhinged and my script evolved into several larger scripts in order to deal with the BS. It became an endless cat and mouse game and I found that I was wasting too much of my time maintaining it just to have a OS that was clean of crap.

The last straw was when a botched update gutted the performance of my PC, and Microsoft took several months to fix the issue. I installed Debian which just worked, and it was good timing because Windows 11 was announced shortly afterwards. I’ve experienced it at work and it’s hands down the worst OS I’ve ever used, and I’ve used pretty much every version of Windows since 3.1. I think I’d even take Me over it. At least that OS sucked because it was poorly designed. Windows 11 is intentionally hostile to its users.

It wasn’t my first rodeo with Linux since I’ve been on and off with it since 2007. Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works out of the box these days.

A few months later and I had built my new machine. I didn’t even bother to install Windows on it. Now I use Arch btw and haven’t looked back.