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?

  • Max-P
    5•6 months 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.

  • @[email protected]English
    4•6 months ago

    I have no idea about the main question, though I too am interested in the answer. I do know the format for the shared partition doesn’t matter. I would go ext4 because I like it’s stability and don’t need btrfs’s features, but use whatever you want.

  • @nikaaa
    3•6 months ago

    You get only one boot partition (EFI partition) which contains the kernel and the initramfs for both operating systems. Then, you would create two partitions to hold the rest of each individual operating system.

    Shared partitions can be ext4, but if they should be read-/writable by windows, I would recommend ntfs or exFAT.

    • CombateyeOP
      1•6 months ago

      I have not used exFAT before, so I did some research and it appears that exFAT does not support permissions or ownership. This sounds like it might be a good option for preventing one OS from messing around with the shared files and causing problems in the other OS.

      Is there anything I should know before trying exFAT or any potential issues with running certain types of files/programs in Windows (since it defaults to NTFS)?

      • @nikaaa
        2•6 months ago

        If the disk is internal and only used by linux, you should 100% use ext4.

        NTFS is what windows uses. exFAT is like really, really old file system that is only used because of its wide compatibility nowadays. USB-sticks use them, because they have to be compatible with any device where you couls potentially stick them in.

  • @solrize
    1•6 months ago

    Pick a distro you like and single boot it. If you want to mess with alternate ones, run them in VMs.

  • CombateyeOP
    1•6 months ago

    [Think there was an error, so reposted the comment.]


    I did some testing in Nobara and it seems like there are various things that just seem to work correctly out of the box. Most of which would not run properly on Linux Mint no matter what I tried when I was using in for ~3-4 weeks.

    Some specifics:

    Mostly issues with Bottles, default proton on Steam (proton-GE did seem to fix these), Goverlay, etc.


    I have decided to keep my current win10 install and just do a single Linux distro.

    Here’s an updated potential setup for Win10/Nobara dual boot.


    NVMe SSD:

    1. Windows 10 partition (NTFS)
      • leaving already installed win10 as needed
    2. Nobara Linux partition (BTRFS) – / & /home
      • Planning on using installer defaults for /boot, /, & /home. (I believe BTRFS is the default)
    3. Data & Games partition (EXT4) – documents, games, & screenshots [connected to /home partition via symlink]
      • I have heard that EXT4 can have some advantages when running games via proton because BTRFS does not have case folding


    SATA SSD:

    1. Current partition (NTFS)
      • leaving it as is to perserve win10 file backups already there
    2. Shared Data partition (exFAT) – music, video files, miscellaneous files like pictures, & an easy way to transfer files between win10/Linux
      • I would like to have a partition where both OSes can read these types of files easily (and so far it does not seem that there will be any significant performance issues like)
    3. Linux backups partition (EXT4/BTRFS?)
      • would like to have space to backup system files, persumably with some kind of snapshots/rollback (or something like Timeshift on Linux Mint). Not sure what setup would make the most sense for Nobara yet



    Question: Does anyone have any recommendations about how large the Nobara Linux partition (/ & /home) should be?

    Since I do not plan to put every type of user data on it and will put all my games on the Data & Games partition (which will the largest amount of SSD space), I imagine that I could get away with a smaller than average / & /home partition here. Of course, I do want to be careful with this since running out of space on / & /home would be a massive headache.