"Force of habit is a powerful force" - Amen on that. Just look how many people are probably still using toothpaste and dental cleanings with fluoride in them (much like municipal water systems). There's a reason folks in the country wake up first, fluoride apparently gums up your pineal gland.

It should boot from it, I think it uses a single partition and it becomes hidden, that's why you can't use it, not entirely sure if that's it though, this method is ok when using a around 4GB pen drive, but yeah, losing all of the 265GB is a pain.

Here's a much better solution for you https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

It's a different approach, and a much better one actually, it makes so you can boot ISO images without even having to burn them, you just install ventoy to your 256GB flash drive, then drop the linux images in the ISOS folder (that it will create)

Then you boot from the drive and you'll see a list of all the images you have there

You can also use the rest of the flash drive normally, it uses just a small portion of it for the bootable part

I'll explain how to use it step by step if you need it

you dont need to convert anything, just different programs same functions and files.

not sure of what it take to convert all personal data, pictures, movies, games, files etc to a new OS like Linux

Mostly it would take nothing at all, it would just work, specially when considering data, pictures, files, you can easily test this, just download the linux mint iso, burn it to a pen drive, boot from it and try and work with your stuff.

it's a fully featured desktop system, comes with internet browser, office software, image viewers, image editors, and a fuck ton of other stuff

And it should already mount your hard drive(s)/partitions automatically, linux works pretty seamlessly with NTFS (microsoft's file system)

Games take a bit more effort, but if we are talking steam here, it does the biggest brunt of the heavy lifting for you, they made it pretty seamless to use, I'm yet to find a made for windows game I can't play at all.

In fact there are a bunch of cases where you have an older game made for windows that has stopped working for windows 10+ but will run flawlessly using compatibility layers and whatnot on Linux

Seriously, unless you use some very highly specialized software that only runs on windows, there's absolutely no reason to not make the switch.

I'm not saying there won't be issues, but if there are, I guarantee you they can be worked around, and it's definitely worth it to dump the company founded by Bill Gates

Personal data & pictures should be a priority backup item at least once or twice a year. Especially if they're under a Windows User partition, as they would be very difficult if not impossible to recover if something bad happens like a complete computer meltdown or loss. This should be almost a thread in itself.

Depends on what you are using.

Office applications

Normally, if you consider word, excel, that sort of thing: you have 4 options available, using:

1. LibreOffice/ OpenOffice. This is compatible, so no conversion is needed.
2. WPS/ AnyOffice: compatible
3. FreeOffice: compatible.

Why this division? Because all three have a different approach and differ in terms of functional compatibility. For instance, FreeOffice has the option of combining a database to a word or spreadsheet document natively. the applications, mentioned under [2], do not have that capability, [1] has that capability but it depends on some archaic Oracle library that may or may not work, and if it works it may break.

So in essence: the usual functions work, but the more ... unknown and hardly used functions like nameranges etc won't as the VB-script back-end is not available.

Database

Should you be using Access as a database, kexi might replace it. But a better way of using database systems would be mysql, sqlite, monodb.

Games

In terms of games: That is an issue solved by several means that may or may not work or partially work:

1. wine (wine HQ).
2. steam
3. COG.

Pictures

Pictures, movies,etc are no problem at all. All the codecs are available and ship with the distro, or can be installed with one click if you so choose, because many of the codecs are non-free.

Solutions

1. Then you have also the option to setup a dual boot of windows and linux, This means that your computer boots up and you choose each time to boot-up windows or linux.

2. Within a Linux setup a virtualization via boxes, virtlib or virtualbox is possible. Personally I use virtlib, that specifically works well on MXlinux. This means that windows could run within a virtual environment. This requires some resources in terms of cpu power and ram.

With the focus on games, you could setup a virtualization of a stripped down windows version to play games.

Other items

If you were to install MXlinux, there are two variants. Systemd and sysvinit. Sysvinit is the standard, and ships with torify and mullvad, which can come in handy.

Personally, I use systemd, because I also like to use lokinet, i2p and others. Then systemd works best. This means that TOR-browser, BISQ-1, BISQ-2, HAVENO, and CAKE wallet can easily be communicating via Tor.

advantages:

In general, for each matter there are opensource and free solutions. And the main difference between Linux and Windows is not about the systems per se, or the vulnerabilities, but the man, or rather attitude. You can be a user, paying through the nose, or a free man scaling the walls of the prison. If you are willing to learn a thing or two, willingness to communicate [sic], Linux is your friend and an awesome teacher.

I did exactly that the other week to install a new distro on a thinkpad, when my usb stick turned sour. Not ideal, but I had no other option available. Shops closed and all that. However, take into account, modern bios systems can play a trick on you, when booting from a usb-HDD/SSD.

But in terms of your usb sticks: you are indicating you cannot format these. Are they being recognized? Meaning, do they indicate a drive number? Have you tried to use device manager? What does it tell you when you put the sticks in?

you could use diskpart from the commandline to restore your usb sticks after using this command: Get-PnpDevice

or <<<Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' } | Format-List>>>

However, if you were to install a linux distro via your usb-hdd/ssd, your options to get a usb working again, multiply.

Try using ventoy, It's a fantastic piece of software

You can install it to anything, thumbdrives, external hard drives, internal hard drives, SSDs, HDDs, it don't mater

Just download the windows package, and launch the "Ventoy2Disk.exe", your 250GB drive, if plugged in, should show in the list, here's a quick guide from the website

After you install it you'll see 2 different devices for that same drive (it creates 2 partitions) one should be named "VTOYEFI" which is the actual application, you don't have to mess with it, the other should be named just "Ventoy"

This Ventoy device is basically just empty space you can use for whatever, and there should be a folder named "Isos" in there, if there isn't just create one, I honestly can't remember if it creates it automatically or not

Then just drop the isos for whatever you want to boot from in that folder, no need to burn them to the drive

That should make it bootable

you don't necessarily need to change boot options, the great majority of motherboards will have a "Boot menu" option at boot, these options show for a short time whenever you boot your pc right at the beginning, using this boot menu option you'll get a list of all the bootable devices from which you can choose, without changing the boot order.

Though if you have "fast/ultrafast boot" or the like enabled in your BIOS/EFI setup you'll need to change that