There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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.

BautAufWasEuchAufbaut ,
@BautAufWasEuchAufbaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Did somebody already mention distrobox?

Macaroni9538 OP ,

Yes! I have to do some research on it

Zucca ,

Choose one:

  • XEN
  • virt-manager
Macaroni9538 OP ,

Gahhh so virtualization is the best route huh? What about lxd/lxc, KVM, or other containers, possibly gnome boxes?

Zucca ,

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.

Macaroni9538 OP ,

That is very surprising to hear. In my mind, if I keep the distros minimal, it seems itd be a simple enough task on the surface. But I guess there’s more that goes into it

ColdWater ,
@ColdWater@lemmy.ca avatar

Buy a fuc ton of flash drive and install every distro into that flash drive

Macaroni9538 OP ,

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

ColdWater ,
@ColdWater@lemmy.ca avatar

You can use it normally if you have large and fast enough drive

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •