Thanks. I'll keep the arch wiki as well as xrandr in mind. Now that you mention it, I eventually managed to play with my colors via xrandr, but ended up staying with windows for the time being (I was using live environments.) I'll also go with the dual boot for now. However, I don't want windows to have access to anything it doesn't strictly need access to for a few games. I was originally going to reset the system and shrink my ssd partition. Unfortunately, shrinking isn't an option according to Windows's partition manager. I'll therefore format that ssd and install windows on a 40gig partition. It'll get a few hundred gigs on one of my hdds for games. That leaves about 60 ssd gigs for linux. Currently, the plan is to assign / to the ssd (so the system is snappy), but mount /usr, /swap, /opt and /home on a hdd (for capacity / read-write reasons). Does this sound good?
Wouldn't using the ssd as swap mean that I end up with regular writes to the ssd? I don't want to shorten its lifespan more than necessary. I don't expect to run out of ram too often at 12gig, but assume that some programs might just use /swap anyways. Does /usr, /opt and /home on one partition sound okay? Or should /home have its own partition (for upgrade reasons)?
swap is allocated by the kernel. If you have 12GiB of memory you're not in any danger of running out unless you're doing rendering or something, but some people like to have some just in case. also I would probably put /usr and /opt in the ssd, they are small and contain some executables/libraries.