Okay, idk your level of comfort or understanding and there’s wildly divergent information in this thread about accessing your files.

So I’m gonna assume you have a windows computer right now and your files are on that computer and you want to use linux on that computer.

That’s very easy and people have been doing it for 25 years using roughly the method I’m gonna describe.

First things first: make a backup. It’s really important because your cat could step on the keyboard and fuck everything up. Or you could make a mistake and fuck everything up. Or I could give you bad advice and fuck everything up. Make a backup.

Then make sure your hard drive isn’t encrypted. Microsoft calls it “bitlocker” and you can check it out by going Start > Settings > Privacy & security > Device encryption > BitLocker drive encryption. It’s fine if you don’t have that option because it’ll only show up if your shit can do it and we’re trying to make sure it’s turned off so it’s fine if it’s not there. If it is, turn it off. That’s gonna be a whole process.

Okay so now your windows computer has an unencrypted drive but we need to make room for Linux so make sure you have at least 50gb free. You’re barely gonna need three to start with, but the process of making room is gonna take space away from windows and you can’t just leave it all cramped up in there.

Now get your usb and make it up with your distro. I just use the non-gui netinstall, but there’s a live installer for both Debian and Ubuntu that boots into a whole ass computer operating system you can play around with.

Once you’re booted into the installer, answer questions normally until it comes to partitioning disks.

This is the part where we will shrink the windows partition. When it asks, pick manual partitioning. You’ll either get a gui or text style gui representing your windows file system. There will be an option to resize the partition. Make the new size less by about half the free space. So if you have a 500gb windows with 200gb free space, make the new windows size 400gb.

Once you’ve done that and hit save or finalize or whatever, go back to the beginning of the partitioning step and choose “guided - use free space”.

Then go through the rest of the installer like normal. At the end it’ll install a boot loader that lets you choose Linux or windows when you turn on the computer. Go ahead and boot into windows to make sure it works still.

When you’re inside Linux, you can access the windows part of the drive. It’ll show up in the file manager as “WINDOWS” or “COMPUTER BRAND” or something. When you click it you’ll need to navigate to the files (/users/yourlogin/downloads or documents or pictures or whatever).

Plenty of people work out of windows file systems, but I always make copies of the files locally to mess with em.

Look to the distro instructions for more precise stuff but that’ll leave you with a computer that you can use with either.

E: if you have specifics (what kind of computer you have, what you ended up choosing as a distro, how much space you have etc) drop em itt and there can be more precise instructions without all the uhhs and aw shucksing.