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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Boot Partitions on Same SSD with 2 Distros (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am new to Linux and wondering about having multiple distros on the same SSD and the best way to partition them. My current plan is to try Nobara Linux while having Linux Mint as a backup. By default I think that both the Mint and Nobara installers will create a partition for /boot and a combination / & /home partition. (Also, the SSD I'm using also has a Windows 10 installation.)

My main question: would running both installers this way could potentially cause any issues with each distro having a separate boot partition on the same SSD?

Bonus question: I plan to have an additional partition for shared data between the 2 distros (documents, pictures, games, etc.). If I recall correctly, by default Mint uses EXT4 and Nobara uses BTRFS for their formatting. Will it make a significant difference for picking one format over the other for the shared partition?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There shouldn't be any issues with that. Most distros handle "install side by side" situations out of the box.

Data partition probably doesn't matter. Nobara might use snapshots for updates so you can rollback, not sure, but it also shouldn't horribly break things for /home.

The thing btrfs does well is root and home can be the same partition, but different subvolumes. Technically you can even have multiple distros on a single btrfs partition by means of subvolumes, so there's no unusable wasted space.

I would do btrfs, Mint won't care about the filesystem having more features than it needs, and there's so many advantages to btrfs.

E: I might leave homes separated and explicitly share some folders you want to keep in sync. Mint's configurations could impact Nobara's configurations and vice-versa. Especially if versions of things differ, maybe Nobara will upgrade some configs and make them unusable with older packages from Mint. You can just symlink your downloads and documents and whatever to a common shared data partition or subvolume dedicated to that use case.