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!!
Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?
Sure. Don’t.
Just use VMs instead. Partitioning your hard drive to boot multiple operating systems from is asking for trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Thanks, though it’s actually that tricky? I honestly figured it would be more simple, but hey I guess not. Ehh I just don’t want to get into VM quite yet; I’ve got alot of other learning to do first. But people dual boot windows and linux all the time with no problems, what is so different about dual booting or in my case triple booting three linux distros?
VMs are so much easier and more fun than dual booting. The best part about VMs is you can use both at once and they’re the same system. Dual booting forces the OS’s apart, and it’s difficult to set up.
They actually don’t. They try and it works for some time. And then the next Windows update intentionally fries their dual-boot. Then they go back to Windows.
Or they understood enough about the details and how to minimize the risk (basically running Linux with an linux boot manager that then chain-loads Windows boot files from another disk, so Windows is mostly oblivious about the other OS… and even then Windows likes to screw with the efi record) that they are mainly running linux. And later they tend to ditch Windows completely of just keep a virtual machine if they really need it for some proprietory stuff.
At least those scenarios above cover 95% of all people “dual-booting” I know…
In comparison, dual- or triple-booting Linux is indeed a bit less problematic. But the same thing applies: You mainly run one. And given that Linux distributions are all nearly the same, with just a few differences in pre-configuration and defaults, there’s not much point to it.
Thanks for the info. Since im an explorer and learner and want to try new things, I figure I ought to step out of my debian/ubuntu bubble and start to familiarize myself with Arch and Fedora (or RHEL I guess?). but I just personally want then physically installed instead of some image in the cloud, ya know? It’s just actually implementing this plan is a tad confusing for me.
Honestly to me it’s not bad, plus I think on a Linux system for home use it’s nice to always push your comfort zone a bit. I use 4 partitions generally: boot files, distro #1, distro #2, and home data on a separate partition. This works for me because I like to tinker with one Linux installation while I have the other in case I need to get real work done while I’m in the middle of fixing the other install. Currently I run Ubuntu and nixos, booting from grub2 efi and letting nixos manage grub installation.
Even when it’s totally borked grub2 is very capable of giving you tools to boot manually, and we all have magic reference books in our pockets 😹
VMs are as easy as installing applications. VirtualBox and VMware do great jobs in guiding users through the process.
