this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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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!!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried distrobox ? That would sound more reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never heard of this one. Some more research to do! Thanks for all the info

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Its a container tool using Podman or Docker.

See a video on "container vs. Virtual machine".

What Distrobox does is downloading container images or any distro basically. It uses your system Kernel still, but all the libraries and packages are from the distro.

I.e. you can install Arch (AUR too), Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Opensuse packages on any distro.

The only thing not working are Flatpak and Snap as they need systemd

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Darn, I do like to use flatpaks and occasionally snaps.... I know I know, most people hate them lol. But the big question for going the VM route is, do the distros I load up remember all my settings, configs, programs, etc? I want them to be like actual desktop distros where everything stays in tact and I'm not resetting everutime I boot up a VM iso

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes they work completely normal. In theory the allocated space also just occupies what is actually used

And if you use Flatpak and snap just install it on your main system?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So this images will always remain the same as I make tweaks and download programs and such? And if I use flatpaks from my main distro, how would that install things on my VM distros?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

A VM is like a container but also with its own Kernel. KVM shares the resources tightly with your systems kernel, so it has best performance afaik.

Its its own system, persistent storage, no interaction except if you choose to with spice integration, network, usb, GPU or filesystem passthrough

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But would you need flatpak and snap with aur

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I guess not haha