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!!
well damn lol… this is deflating. I honestly would rather avoid VMs for now. trying to focus more on the meat and potatoes of Linux and other topics. I took a deep dive down virtualization and I got lost quickly and broke some stuff haha not really sure if now is the time for me to learn it. I’ve sorta put it on the backburner for now. So no easier, alternatives? You think manually doing this is not a good idea?
To be honest, VMs are probably the easiest way to do it, like many said already. You don’t need to deep dive into virtualization to set up a few VMs and use them to learn about different distros. No need to think about how to partition your drive, mounting swap partition, disable hibernation… Want to try out another OS? Just create a new VM and you a ready to use it. You can simply create shared folders between host and guest and enable shared clipboard, if you want. Switching between the different systems is much easier than shutting down and rebooting another OS. You can even run them at the same time if you want and your hardware is good enough. And aside from the better convenience, the potential to break something is much less compared to tinkering around with a multi boot system, imo.
Do you have a recommended platform for virtualization that would fit my project?
I use VirtualBox, mostly because I started with that years ago amd had no reason to change. From what you described, it’s capable of your project.
Perfect, thank you!
Just pick a distro. It sounds like you want to learn. I suggest arch. It does the least for you, is the least opinionated, but also has by far the best documentation (arch wiki is the de facto linux documentation).
The difference between the distros is otherwise simply what package management tool they use, and what packages are in their repository. Nothing else is different that’s of any importance.