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!!

  • Ooops@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    They actually don’t. They try and it works for some time. And then the next Windows update intentionally fries their dual-boot. Then they go back to Windows.

    Or they understood enough about the details and how to minimize the risk (basically running Linux with an linux boot manager that then chain-loads Windows boot files from another disk, so Windows is mostly oblivious about the other OS… and even then Windows likes to screw with the efi record) that they are mainly running linux. And later they tend to ditch Windows completely of just keep a virtual machine if they really need it for some proprietory stuff.

    At least those scenarios above cover 95% of all people “dual-booting” I know…

    In comparison, dual- or triple-booting Linux is indeed a bit less problematic. But the same thing applies: You mainly run one. And given that Linux distributions are all nearly the same, with just a few differences in pre-configuration and defaults, there’s not much point to it.