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.
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.
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.
VM are as easy as point and click with GNOME Boxes, also available as standalone.
Gotcha. Never explored Gnome boxes yet; probably just waiting for the right time. I’ve been trying to learn a whole lot of other tech stuff, so I sorta put virtualization on the back burner for now. Definitely wanna learn about KVM, lxd and lxc and even gnome boxes. just not right now
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.
Perfect! I will be disabling hibernation in Bios. Also, how exactly do you choose a default bootloader when each distro automatically installs their own? not sure on that process. Or do things like display managers matter? or is Xorg or Wayland pretty much good for all three?
What?
- Install
virt-manager qemu qemu-kvm - Run virt-manager
- Install a new distro, choose the .iso that you downloaded, assign 8GB RAM and 60GB storage
- Leave the rest default
- Follow the Distros installing process as usual
- 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.
So virt manager, KVM, and qemu is the recommendation solution for this? Opposed to other methods like virtual box or gnome boxes or the other various virtualization platforms out there?
Dude please excuse my ignorance, but I would obviously need to make a bootloader partition, but do I have to like download grub software and install it on that partition or is that something the system will do during the partitioning process itself?
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
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.
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
Oh I just watched a video about home. So is that a partition of it’s own? the guy was saying he was using different homes for each distro and it became a mess, so he planned to install one home directory for all distros… idk?
/home is a directory (“folder”). Inside that directory, there’s one subdirectory for each user, where you’re expected to keep your personal files, configuration files, user data from software (e.g. save games from your games), stuff like this, personal data.
And Linux allows you to mount any partition in any directory of your choice.
Because of those two things, a lot of people create a partition and mount it as /home. So if something bad happens with the distro, and you need to reinstall it, your princess is in another castle your data is in another partition, safely stored. It’s usually a good idea, but in your case it’s a bad idea - because your /home/[insert username] directory from one distro will be likely the same as in the other distros, so they’ll interfere on each other, and software user data will become a mess.
Instead, what I recommend you is to not create a /home partition. Let each distro have its own /home. However, do create a partition to store your data, and mount it inside your /home/[insert your username] directory. That way you can access all your files from all your distros, but the software user data won’t be mixed.
Ahh brilliant! so create ONE storage partition and just mount that one partition in each distro’s home directory?
Have you tried distrobox ? That would sound more reasonable.
Never heard of this one. Some more research to do! Thanks for all the info
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
Darn, I do like to use flatpaks and occasionally snaps… I know I know, most people hate them lol. But the big question for going the VM route is, do the distros I load up remember all my settings, configs, programs, etc? I want them to be like actual desktop distros where everything stays in tact and I’m not resetting everutime I boot up a VM iso
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?
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.
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.
Thanks. The time I was using Manjaro, I liked it alot but am also confused by the weird negative reputation…
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!
