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Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?

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!!

BautAufWasEuchAufbaut ,
@BautAufWasEuchAufbaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Did somebody already mention distrobox?

Macaroni9538 OP ,

Yes! I have to do some research on it

throwawayish ,

Perhaps consider watching this excellent video guide on dualbooting and multibooting by DorianDotSlash. It was what I used as a reference the first few times I engaged in dualbooting and/or multibooting.

PipedLinkBot ,

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Macaroni9538 OP ,

Thank you so much

Pantherina ,

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!

Macaroni9538 OP ,

If I utilize this route, do you believe it’d be more trouble than anything or should it hypothetically work just fine?

librecat ,
@librecat@lemmy.basedcount.com avatar

Not an answer to your question, but have you checked out Bedrock Linux as opposed to installing multiple distros? Or maybe using virtual machines?

Macaroni9538 OP ,

I have HEARD of Bedrock but never really read about it. I will give it a check out now. Not too interested in VM’s ATM

Dotdev ,
@Dotdev@programming.dev avatar

Bedrock linux is not a vm. It is a meta distro means it runs on top of your distros kernel.

Macaroni9538 OP ,

Oh I wasn’t inferring Bedrock was VM, was just saying I dont want to explore the VM route… I tried to before and messed things up lol though I will learn about it down the road! I’ll read up on Bedrock though

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