Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop? - eviltoast

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!!

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Immutable + atomic. Its similar to Android or IOS. It can be explained like that:

    • big parts of the core OS cant be changed easily. Immutable means “you cant change/break it”. This also applies to software, third party install scripts, viruses and other things that might break your system.
    • atomic: updates are done like this:
    1. The system is an image, as if you would live boot a usb stick
    2. When you do an update, the package manager checks on the server for changes, I think it uses git. Only the changes are downloaded.
    3. rpm-ostree has downloaded the diffs, updated packages basically. Instead of just replacing your local packages, from the full operating system on your machine it builds a new image. Remember, the image is like the live USB or CDROM you can boot and use but not change.
    4. This new image is staged. This means if you reboot, you will boot into the updated version automatically. Updates go in the background and you will have a working system without any downtime. This is so much faster than for example Windows Updates or even standard Fedora “secure updates”.
    5. atomic means that if something in that process fails, you will simply not get an update. So updates cant break anything.
    6. But dont forget its Linux and not Android. You can actually install what you want. This means during the “get updates phase” you can not only download “regular update packages” but also any other Fedora RPM package you want. This is called layering, as now this package is always added to your system on every update, as remember on every update your system would get resetted. You can also remove preinstalled packages, a common one on Fedora is the Firefox RPM.

    That you can normally install apps is thanks to Flatpak, so you dont need to reboot on every install. The idea is to have a very slim core system and “outsource” as much as possible to Flatpak. This means at the same time, official packages, less work for the distro maintainers, and containerization.

    In the future even more packages will be removed as native packages and installed through Flatpak. Buts still a developing technology and important things like native messaging or USB access (hardware security keys) are still missing.