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Hello all, sorry for such a newbish question, as I should probably know how to properly partition a hard drive, but I really don't know where to start. So what I'm looking to do is install a Debian distro, RHEL, and Arch. Want to go with Mint LMDE, Manjaro, and Fedora. I do not need very much storage, so I don't think space is an issue. I have like a 500+ something GB ssd and the few things that I do need to store are in a cloud. I pretty much use my laptop for browsing, researching, maybe streaming videos, and hopefully more programming and tinkering as I learn more; that's about all... no gaming or no data hoarding.

Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the "run alongside" option? or would I have to manually partition things out? Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros, etc.? hoping you kind folks can offer me some simple advice on how to go about this without messing up my system. It SEEMS simple enough and it might be so, but I just don't personally know how to go about it lol. Thanks alot!!

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[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Warning: this is definitively doable, but messier than it looks like. I'd recommend you to partition it manually, before installing any distro, like this:

  • one partition per distro. For sizes check their requirements. Given 500GB I'd probably reserve 60GB for each, perhaps a bit more if I know that I'll install a lot of stuff in that distro.
  • one swap partition, that'll be accessed across distros. Optional if you have 16GB+ of RAM.
  • use the leftover space for a "storage" partition, for personal files that you won't save in someone else's computer (i.e. the cloud). That allows you to mess with the distros without risking your personal files.

Don't worry too much on getting the space right though - if necessary you can always resize a few partitions after installation. It's a bit of a bother though.

Do not share /home across distros, it's simply more trouble than it's worth. Instead, mount that "storage" partition in each distro, inside your /home/[$username] directory.


Another thing that you might want to consider is virtualisation. Odds are that you won't use a lot of those distros in your everyday, and that you're just curious about their differences. In that case, consider installing one of them, install Virtualbox in it, and then the other distros get installed inside Virtualbox. I'm suggesting that because it'll use overall less space, and make distro management less messy.

[–] Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Thanks. I do not want to mess around with virtualization; I went down that rabbithole before and got lost and broke stuff lol. I need to do a bit more research and learning before im more confident with virtualization. So how large should the swap be? and what about a bootloader?? Are all three compatible with grub? also how large should the bootloader partition be? thanks, this is all a bit foreign to me.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (28 children)

All those distros are compatible with grub, and come with their own copies of it. You just need to install your distros, and then when you say "I want THIS ONE to manage boot", you follow this tutorial. (It's supposed to help you reinstalling grub after Windows, but it works fine for grub after another Linux instal).

Or, if you want to be lazy - install last the distro that you want to manage boot, then tell it "screw the current boot, reinstall it".

I wouldn't bother with a bootloader partition. The bootloader runs fine from any distro partition, and it's small enough so you don't need to worry about it wasting space.

swap

I've been running my system without swap whatsoever for quite some time, and it runs fine. But if you're planning to use hibernation or similar, reserve the same amount of swap space as you have RAM; for example if you have 8GB RAM then at least 8GB swap.

IMPORTANT: if hibernating a distro, don't boot another distro, otherwise the hibernation data will get wiped.

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[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What?

  1. Install virt-manager qemu qemu-kvm
  2. Run virt-manager
  3. Install a new distro, choose the .iso that you downloaded, assign 8GB RAM and 60GB storage
  4. Leave the rest default
  5. Follow the Distros installing process as usual
  6. Delete the VM if you are done

Important note: using distrobox or toolbox you can run packages of pretty much any distro on your Laptop. I am currently using Ubuntu PPA VLC 4.0 on Fedora Kinoite.

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[–] odium@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Grub is compatible with pretty much everything.

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[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Really nice idea with the shared swap and storage!

Caveats:

  • you can LUKS encrypt that, but you may need to tweak some polkit rules to automatically unlock it.
  • Fedora uses zram and swap and SELinux is a hell of a task

Apart from that, great recommendation!

In the end you can simply delete all partitions except your storage partition, reinstall any distro and mount that partition to /home

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[–] Dotdev@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried distrobox ? That would sound more reasonable.

[–] Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never heard of this one. Some more research to do! Thanks for all the info

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Its a container tool using Podman or Docker.

See a video on "container vs. Virtual machine".

What Distrobox does is downloading container images or any distro basically. It uses your system Kernel still, but all the libraries and packages are from the distro.

I.e. you can install Arch (AUR too), Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Opensuse packages on any distro.

The only thing not working are Flatpak and Snap as they need systemd

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[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So Question: What do you actually want to achieve?

Do you want a rolling, semi-rolling or stable releases? More tested or even LTS packages, or the latest?

[–] Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Uhmmm so it would be interesting to learn about rolling releases and thats where my choice of manjaro could fit in. Sometimes I simply get bored of debian/Ubuntu but its what I'm most familiar with. The goal is to learn and USE other distros. Not just browse or hop around but I want to use the three main distro types all on one system. I want things to remain in tact like a normal workstation installed on your desktop. Idk much about virtualization, but I'm under the impression that they wipe your disk or a certain distro clean after each use. I do NOT want that.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I went a huge journey.

  • mint, crashed
  • manjaro, weird reputation but very nice
  • mxlinux: damn old packages back then
  • kubuntu: broke
  • kde neon: lol also broke
  • fedora kde: broke
  • fedora kinoite: have it the longest, didnt break yet

I like immutable as you can reset your system. You can see most of your deviation from "what works" using rpm-ostree status.

And sorry but its all Linux, it doesnt work differently if you are not a server admin or tweaking SELinux, custom polkit rules and stuff like that.

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[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So... I guess it should work but you will end up with looots of partitions and pretty sure you have no idea what is what.

But if you plan on nuking it in the end, here is how to do it:

  • install a Distro to full hard drive
  • use some partition manager like KDE-Partitionmanager (the best of all) or Gparted and resize the big ext4/btrfs/zfs whatever storage partition as small as you want
  • install the next distro into the empty space
  • shrink that distros storage again, repeat

And please report if some crazy stuff happens with Grub or if you get secureboot working!

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[–] librecat@lemmy.basedcount.com 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not an answer to your question, but have you checked out Bedrock Linux as opposed to installing multiple distros? Or maybe using virtual machines?

[–] Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have HEARD of Bedrock but never really read about it. I will give it a check out now. Not too interested in VM's ATM

[–] Dotdev@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bedrock linux is not a vm. It is a meta distro means it runs on top of your distros kernel.

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[–] Gurfaild@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (24 children)

One thing that might matter is that if all distros use the same swap partition for hibernation, you shouldn't boot one distro after hibernating another or you might overwrite the saved RAM contents.

If you use different swap partitions or files, you probably should still avoid writing to a partition that belongs to a distro that isn't actually shut down.

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[–] SnailMagnitude@mander.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why?

Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don't know how to partition a disk. I'd want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.

If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what's working/broken go for the triple boot.

Docker could be worth a shot. You can 'docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever' and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn't too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.

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[–] redprog@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

All these people saying don't do it - clearly, they're trying to learn something and are not necessarily after a fully usable, encrypted production system. Instead of telling them it's too complicated, we should encourage to play around and figure it out, so in the process maybe they find out on their own why this configuration might not make any sense in most situations.

So @op, just go for it, you're going to learn a lot from this!

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[–] throwawayish@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perhaps consider watching this excellent video guide on dualbooting and multibooting by DorianDotSlash. It was what I used as a reference the first few times I engaged in dualbooting and/or multibooting.

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[–] doomkernel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It could be done if you partition your disk prior to installing but, if there is no particular reason, you could make a bunch of VM's and daily drive one of the distros.

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