As others have suggested it is probably smarter to just backup windows onto a portable hard drive, or you could do Windows2Go which is finicky but do-able.

Also you didn’t ask what distro, but I have been enjoying Fedora Kinoite it’s a very smooth transition (and improvement) from Windows.

Thanks for all the great ideas everyone, it seems so much less overwhelming now.

I’ll pick up an external hd today and start trying things out.

why not just wipe the ssd and put Linux on it? dual boot should work fine, and if you have problems with it you could post it here

You’ve survived and perhaps thrived booting off the HDD for a while, so I would wipe the SSD and install Linux there if you intend to switch over at some point. That’s what I did for my test bench, my last personal machine with Windows; Linux on an SSD and Windows on an old HDD, where the slow speeds don’t really bother my infrequent use.

I’d switch over completely if I wasn’t dependent on the Adobe CS (another problem I plan to fix in time, I know there are alternatives).

If you insist: WinBoat

When doing IT support for my parents windows PC I used the following two options in the past:

• software that can copy the programs to a new install (but it was flakey and couldn’t copy every app)

• just cloning the whole drive with clonezilla. As long as the new drive is equal or larger than the old one, this worked perfectly.

There is a clonezilla live boot iso somewhere, or you can do it with any linux live boot and gparted + dd. Just make sure to have a backup of your important data outside of this PC (just in case you fuck up) learn what the tools and command do before running them and tripple check that you are copying the old install to the new drive, not the other way around.

Then after the cloning unplug the old HDD for testing. Because a clone will have identical IDs the boot process and some programs might get confused.

During the linux install, unplug the windows ssd and have only the hdd attached, again for the ID issues and just be extra safe to not fuck anything up.

I’ve done basically the same thing with my computer. While I was still stuck with Windows, my main installation broke and took ages to boot. I installed another copy onto the same disk to run some software, then dual (triple?) booted with Mint.

Mine are all on the same physical disk, but the process should be the same.

The Mint bootloader took over from Windows, and presents me with a menu on boot. The default choice is Mint, which automatically boots after a few seconds, but it gives me a few options, one of which is the Windows bootloader. If I choose this, it gives me the same options as before I installed Mint, so lets me boot into either installation.

It goes without saying, but make a backup before you change anything, and remember that Boot Repair is available for most Linux distros :)

When I moved Windows from hdd to ssd I used EaseUs disk cloning, they had an option specifically for migrating windows, there were some issues along the way, but somehow I managed it (I think I had to physically disconnect the old windows HDD for the windows on the SSD to load)

So I would wipe the ssd, migrate windows properly with disk cloning and then set up Linux dual boot.

Oh, I’ve done messes like this… I had a machine whose UEFI had like five things on it. This doesn’t solve it all, but I really like refind for taking care of whacky multi boot scenarios. Just install it and it scans all the drives in a system for OSes and gives you a menu on startup.
There are various VM solutions out there to handle running one-off windows programs, by the way. I have a copy of Win11 inside a Proxmox VM that runs those few times I need desktop Office for something specific. I’m sure others will come in with better solutions, but those are the ones I’ve used.