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!!
Why do you want to do this? If it’s just to try out different distributions, I would suggest using per-distro virtual machines or USB drives instead.
Well its more than just trying them out, in want to learn and actually use them too. Like as work stations, not just like a live image where you can browse around. Sometimes in get bored of my debian distro and I dont want to just delete it and reinstall another type, ya know? I’d rather have all three where I can actually use and work on them and they all stay in tact and keep all my settings and files and programs, like how a normal desktop installed distro does. More of a learning and adventure thing than anything. One day I could focus on manjaro and then the next work on fedora or if I get bored and just want to casually use my computer I could just hop on my more comfortable debian distro. Idk maybe it seems weird to others, its just how my brain works. I want to be proficient in the big three, plus opensuse eventually too.
Choose one:
- XEN
- virt-manager
Gahhh so virtualization is the best route huh? What about lxd/lxc, KVM, or other containers, possibly gnome boxes?
virt-manager uses QEMU/KVM by default. Some distros do work in containers too.
Xen turn your PC into a hypervisor. Where you can switch your OS without much hassle.
Making each OS boot on bare metal will make you cry if you want to be able to boot several different OSes.
Buy a fuc ton of flash drive and install every distro into that flash drive
But why though? I already have a ventoy usb drive for just exploring other distros, but I’m looking to actually learn and use other distros, just not one at a time :) It would ideal to have three workststions, one for each major distro I.e. arch, rhel, debian
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!
