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!!

  • @mvirts
    link
    51 year ago

    Honestly to me it’s not bad, plus I think on a Linux system for home use it’s nice to always push your comfort zone a bit. I use 4 partitions generally: boot files, distro #1, distro #2, and home data on a separate partition. This works for me because I like to tinker with one Linux installation while I have the other in case I need to get real work done while I’m in the middle of fixing the other install. Currently I run Ubuntu and nixos, booting from grub2 efi and letting nixos manage grub installation.

    Even when it’s totally borked grub2 is very capable of giving you tools to boot manually, and we all have magic reference books in our pockets 😹