The easiest solution is to format windows partition and mount it as separate mount point (for example /mnt/extra) and use it for storing any large files you have (movies, songs, books, photos, backups, downloaded files …)

For historical reasons, I’ve had a /space partition for several machines now. It’s used for large media archives, buffering towards other servers (which only grab stuff every now and then), cold storage and the like.

that is an odd layout, even for a windows system with linux added later.

what’s the actual order of the partitions on disk?

Personally I’d just boot into a live environment so the SSD isn’t in use, backup important things, then wipe windows partitions and resize /home to use the rest of the space on the disk

I would simply delete sda1 and sda2, then that whole part will be available as 1. Format as ext4.

If you play games with steam you could then use it as a space to put games. Steam handles it for you. When you add a disk via Steam settings, it will be listed as an option.

Moving partitions is a tedious task and doesn’t always pan out, I personally wouldn’t risk it. Let it be a thing to do if you would ever reinstall completely for whatever reason and start fresh then.

Also, backup backup backup.

The fat32 formated partitions are EFI System Partitions used to boot your PC. I assume that sda3 is the one Windows created, while a later Linux install created sda5 as an alternative. Yet sda5 doesn’t seem to be really used (with that cute 9MB used), so your Linux boot stuff -including a bootloader that would allow you to start Windows (or you picking directly from EFI?)- is probably all sitting alongside Windows’ EFI stuff in sda3.

In fact I wouldn’t touch anything there without some backup.

Boot a live image from USB, copy /home to a separate physical disk preserving ownerships and permissions, and save anything from the windows partitions that you want you keep. Once you’ve verified the copy is good delete all the original partitions on the screenshot.

From here you install from scratch. You’ll appreciate it later when things aren’t a jumbled mess.

If you have any kind of ssd install the OS to that instead, then use that spinning drive for /home. If you have two ssd drives do /home on the second one and use the spinning one for longer term storage like music or videos or the like.

Also don’t put your swap partition on an ssd, use the spinning drive for it so you’re not wearing out the ssd. You can do a swap file instead of a partition if you miss the windows way. 😆

Everything with a lock means it’s mounted and in use. sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4 should be safe to format, however as others have mentioned, booting into a live environment is the best course of action as it lets you freely move or extend partitions.

I suggest finding a thumb drive and flashing Gparted onto it.

Unfortunately, your existing /home and the ntfs partitions you could remove are in completely non-contiguous regions, so you cannot easily just combine the space. If I were you, I would switch to LVM piece-meal. Ideally, you’d have some other medium were you can temporarily store the current contents of /home while your repartition the drive. Then combine sda2 and sda7 into a volume group and pull just one logical volume out of it for the new /home.

Otherwise, create a new volume group with only sda2 in it (just overwrite the existing ntfs filesystem) using vgcreate, create a logical on top of that using lvcreate, make a filesystem in that using mkfs.ext4, I would add the -m 0 parameter for a non-root filesystem, mount that somewhere under /mnt/, move or copy over all the contents from /home to that mountpoint, taking care to replicate file owners and permissions (I would just use cp -a), then once this is done (and you’ve double-checked that it is because at the next step you can lose data if you’re not careful), umount /home, extend the volume group to include sda7 using vgextend, enlarge the logical volume for the new /home to the maximum using lvresize, enlarge the ext4 filesystem in there to the maximum possible using resize2fs, finally editing /etx/fstab to use that new logical volume as /home and remounting /home.

The easy thing is to just format them ext4 and use them as extra data storage.

Edit 2: don’t delete the efi partition!!! Move that just like your system partition. Unless you want to learn how to rebuild it :) unless you’re using Windows boot manager you can remove the Microsoft folder from the efi partition as well

The good news is your system partition is small so you can delete the first two partitions. Make a small boot partition if you want, make a new system partition second ( bigger than your current one), copy the existing system partition into the new one (without deleting the old one), boot into the new system partition, test that it works, then expand the fs to fill the partition. Then you can move your home partition if you want or just make your system partition huge to fill the space up to your existing home partition, then delete the last partitions an grow your home partition to fill the disk

Edit: once you know the new system partition works you delete the old one.

Use a surface cleaner first. You wanna get the majority of the crud broken up and off first, wiping towards the middle then go get the whole thing with a glass cleaner using a microfiber cloth if you don’t have a squeegee.