Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?
Sure. Don't.
Just use VMs instead. Partitioning your hard drive to boot multiple operating systems from is asking for trouble if you don't know what you're doing.
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Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?
Sure. Don't.
Just use VMs instead. Partitioning your hard drive to boot multiple operating systems from is asking for trouble if you don't know what you're doing.
Thank you Stack Exchange.
Warning: this is definitively doable, but messier than it looks like. I'd recommend you to partition it manually, before installing any distro, like this:
Don't worry too much on getting the space right though - if necessary you can always resize a few partitions after installation. It's a bit of a bother though.
Do not share /home across distros, it's simply more trouble than it's worth. Instead, mount that "storage" partition in each distro, inside your /home/[$username] directory.
Another thing that you might want to consider is virtualisation. Odds are that you won't use a lot of those distros in your everyday, and that you're just curious about their differences. In that case, consider installing one of them, install Virtualbox in it, and then the other distros get installed inside Virtualbox. I'm suggesting that because it'll use overall less space, and make distro management less messy.
Thanks. I do not want to mess around with virtualization; I went down that rabbithole before and got lost and broke stuff lol. I need to do a bit more research and learning before im more confident with virtualization. So how large should the swap be? and what about a bootloader?? Are all three compatible with grub? also how large should the bootloader partition be? thanks, this is all a bit foreign to me.
VM are as easy as point and click with GNOME Boxes, also available as standalone.
Gotcha. Never explored Gnome boxes yet; probably just waiting for the right time. I've been trying to learn a whole lot of other tech stuff, so I sorta put virtualization on the back burner for now. Definitely wanna learn about KVM, lxd and lxc and even gnome boxes. just not right now
All those distros are compatible with grub, and come with their own copies of it. You just need to install your distros, and then when you say "I want THIS ONE to manage boot", you follow this tutorial. (It's supposed to help you reinstalling grub after Windows, but it works fine for grub after another Linux instal).
Or, if you want to be lazy - install last the distro that you want to manage boot, then tell it "screw the current boot, reinstall it".
I wouldn't bother with a bootloader partition. The bootloader runs fine from any distro partition, and it's small enough so you don't need to worry about it wasting space.
swap
I've been running my system without swap whatsoever for quite some time, and it runs fine. But if you're planning to use hibernation or similar, reserve the same amount of swap space as you have RAM; for example if you have 8GB RAM then at least 8GB swap.
IMPORTANT: if hibernating a distro, don't boot another distro, otherwise the hibernation data will get wiped.
Really nice idea with the shared swap and storage!
Caveats:
Apart from that, great recommendation!
In the end you can simply delete all partitions except your storage partition, reinstall any distro and mount that partition to /home
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:
And please report if some crazy stuff happens with Grub or if you get secureboot working!
So Question: What do you actually want to achieve?
Do you want a rolling, semi-rolling or stable releases? More tested or even LTS packages, or the latest?
Uhmmm so it would be interesting to learn about rolling releases and thats where my choice of manjaro could fit in. Sometimes I simply get bored of debian/Ubuntu but its what I'm most familiar with. The goal is to learn and USE other distros. Not just browse or hop around but I want to use the three main distro types all on one system. I want things to remain in tact like a normal workstation installed on your desktop. Idk much about virtualization, but I'm under the impression that they wipe your disk or a certain distro clean after each use. I do NOT want that.
I went a huge journey.
I like immutable as you can reset your system. You can see most of your deviation from "what works" using rpm-ostree status
.
And sorry but its all Linux, it doesnt work differently if you are not a server admin or tweaking SELinux, custom polkit rules and stuff like that.
I run Debian with a bunch of virtual machines for exploring other distros. This might not be a good solution for a laptop though.
All these people saying don't do it - clearly, they're trying to learn something and are not necessarily after a fully usable, encrypted production system. Instead of telling them it's too complicated, we should encourage to play around and figure it out, so in the process maybe they find out on their own why this configuration might not make any sense in most situations.
So @op, just go for it, you're going to learn a lot from this!
Why?
Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don't know how to partition a disk. I'd want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.
If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what's working/broken go for the triple boot.
Docker could be worth a shot. You can 'docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever' and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn't too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.
Not an answer to your question, but have you checked out Bedrock Linux as opposed to installing multiple distros? Or maybe using virtual machines?
One thing that might matter is that if all distros use the same swap partition for hibernation, you shouldn't boot one distro after hibernating another or you might overwrite the saved RAM contents.
If you use different swap partitions or files, you probably should still avoid writing to a partition that belongs to a distro that isn't actually shut down.
It could be done if you partition your disk prior to installing but, if there is no particular reason, you could make a bunch of VM's and daily drive one of the distros.
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.
Why do you want to do this? If it's just to try out different distributions, I would suggest using per-distro virtual machines or USB drives instead.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Crleyglb4mo
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