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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!!

sparr ,

You should be able to share a significant fraction of your home directory.

ulu_mulu ,

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?

If you install one distro on full hard drive you won’t have room anymore for the rest, if you want multiple operating systems on your machine you need to partition manually with some planning ahead on how to allocate the space.

Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros

They don’t interfere with each other, they don’t even “see” each other once you booted into one, they only share the boot manager.

That being said, what you intend to do was the only way to learn many years ago when computers weren’t as powerful as they are today (I did learn that way), but today ANY PC can manage virtual machines, they are much more practical and can save you a lot of time when you mess things up, because whatever you do is confined within the VM and doesn’t affect your PC as a whole.

Install Virtualbox, have a look at how it works and use that to do all experiments you want, you can even learn to multiboot inside a single VM, without the risk of messing up your system.

lloram239 ,

You can use one big BTRFS and multiple subvolumes, that allows you to share the free space across all the distributions. If the distribution supports that, that might be the easiest option, though not all of them do (Guix didn’t last time I tried).

Using distrobox or a VM is also an option and saves you the dual booting, which will get old fast.

ultra ,

Not really a solution to what you need, but you should consider distros other than manjaro, it does some shady stuff, has ddos’ed the AUR multiple times (even though the AUR is “unsupported”) and let the security certificates for their site expire (their solution: to turn back your clock to update the system). You should try endeavour instead.

Macaroni9538 OP ,

Very interesting and also such a shame. Manjaro seems to have most support and definitely looks and feel the greatest that I’ve tried, all well being newbish friendly

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