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!!
There just isn’t any reason to do it manually. You don’t learn anything useful that you can’t learn on a VM. And it adds complexity to your system that doesn’t need to be there.
As others have stated, the main risk comes from having Windows as one of your partitions, as Windows doesn’t care if you are working with other systems, it only cares about Windows.
I know SOLID principles are meant for object oriented programming, but, they have merit in many areas. One of the more impactful ones is the principle of single responsibility “…[X] should do one thing and therefore it should have only a single reason to change.” Adding in additional responsibilities increases entropy and increases the likelihood that if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to pinpoint what caused it, and therefore how to fix it. Situations like that are antithetical to your stated impetus of learning.
However, if you used virtual machines, not only are you now abiding by the principle of single responsibility, but you are also giving yourself access to standard industry tools and techniques that will serve you well in your learning journey. For example, when dual booting, if you royally mess something up, you are now left with a useless hunk of computer until you either figure out what you did and how to undo it, or you just give up and reinstall your OS. With VMs, you can just take a snapshot before you make your changes, and if shit hits the fan, you just revert to your snapshot and retry. This gives you the chance to figure out not just what happened, but why, and how to avoid it, all without losing access to your main system.
Not only that, but multiple VMs can be running simultaneously and can be used to simulate networks of interconnected machines all running disparate software with different goals and responsibilities.
It’s obviously your computer and your choice. But, I’m trying to save you the headache many of us had to go through on our learning adventures. Just use VMs.
Is there a specific VM software or method you would recommend for this project?
VirtualBox is the simplest and must accessible option for beginners. It’s not very well aligned with Linux ethos, but it is easy to use and is well documented with many users to help if you need it. It also does a good job of walking you through the installation process when setting up VMs.
Thanks a lot. I’m just looking for more permanent solutions. Idk a whole lot about VM, but isn’t your image wiped after each use? I dont want to keep tweaking settings and configurations, I want them to be like my own personal desktop where you install your own programs and make your own configurations and tweaks and they actually remain. Is that possible for VM distros? I would like to actually learn and use the other distros as work stations too. Not just trying to peak and toy around with other distros. If that were the case, I’d use my ventoy drive
So, for a bit of a crash course, a virtual machine is just that, a machine that is virtualized. So, anything you can do with your physical machine (your computer) you can do on a virtual machine. (You could even dual or triple [or more] boot a VM)
Just like a normal computer, changes made to a virtual machine are persistent unless you configure them not to be. So no need to worry about losing changes. (Though, I would suggest taking a snapshot of your newly installed distro as soon as you finish the initial installation, it will be useful if you need a clean starting point for something you want to do)
I suggest you download a couple of Linux distros you want to play with, download VirtualBox, and setup a virtual machine for each distro. You can also setup the VM to run in full screen mode, so it feels like native.
There are tons of guides online to help you out, and a large number of computer nerds here that will help you too.
The one limitation with VMs is gaming. You can get around that limitation once you’re more well versed with them, but just don’t expect to be gaming on a VM for quite a while.
