this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fedora's swap on zram shouldn't pose a problem - at most it won't use the disk swap, but other distros still would.

Encryption is important but I wonder if OP would make much use out of it, given that he plans to bulk store his items in the cloud. The storage partition would be mostly for things "at hand". And if necessary, as you said, some elbow grease lets you have encryption and still access it from all distros.

I don't recommend OP to mount that partition directly to /home itself. It's bound to create problems later on due to software in different versions interacting with software that may or may not be present depending on the distro. Mounting it inside some other directory (even inside /home, e.g. /home/username/storage) feels considerably safer.

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

Right you would then have something like

  • swap
  • zram
  • /home/user/storage
  • boot
  • boot/efi
  • /
  • boot
  • boot/efi
  • /
  • boot
  • boot/efi

...

What a mess. But if you kinda keep track of what is what (maybe search for the packages dnf apt yay and so on) it can work

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

It's less messy than it looks like.

Physically you'd have N+2 partitions for N systems: one for swap, another for storage, and N for system files. Then inside each system you'd have simply to mount the swap, /, and /home/user/storage.

I recommended OP to turn EFI off, it sounds pointless in his situation. Regarding /boot: it boils down to installing grub in one of those distros, and letting it manage the boot.