We all know about dual-booting, but has anyone tried having 10 different operating systems installed on the same disk (partitioned, of course)?
I'm embarking on a new project which will see me having different distros. I could do this with VMs, but I think full installs give us the best performance no matter the distro.
I haven't installed more than two OS at a time (always been Windows and a Linux distro), so I'm not sure how well grub and other stuff would work with multiple different distros, more so since different distros may have different versions of grub (or something completely different?).
Has anyone tried this before? I might have the following distros installed:
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Zorin OS
Fedora GNOME
Fedora KDE
Pop_OS
Debian
Tuxedo OS
ElementaryOS
Might be more installed temporarily.
How terrible of an idea is it to have all of them installed on a single 1 TB SSD? Assuming each OS requires more or less 100 GB, I can have them on their own partitions.
I'm open to other ideas. I would prefer not having different computers for each of them, but if installing so many widely varied distros on a single bootloader is going to cause headaches, I'll avoid this approach and rethink other ways to do this.
If you are going down this route, one problem can be with /home. I would create a separate partition for /home, then install each OS and point to the shared /home partition. You really
Should give PCLinuxOS Debian Plasma a try. It's my daily driver.
Hi, thanks! I don't need the filesystem to be shared between the distros. Think of them as testing grounds. (And none of them will be my daily driver.)
Thanks for sharing that! I wish he went a little more deeper as to how all those distros are set up....
Edit: From the screenshot on this thread, it looks like most (if not all) are in the same GRUB. I don't see Fedora on that list. I wonder if Fedora and others will use the same Grub.
There is a video showing how to install antiX by StaemPunk TV, and when he gets to the part about partitioning, you can see his disk and that's what he does. He has one efi/esp partition, and one swap partition, and one data partition, then he parcels out the disk in sections for different distro root partitions and pointed to the swap, esp and data/home partition to save space. I thought it was really clever and looked well organized. antiX 22 Configuration & Theming [Step by step] - YouTube
He starts showing how to do it @ 11:50
EDIT: On rewatching how he does it, I see he doesn't point Home to his data partition, he just leaves Home out and mounts the data partition later.
One problem that may vex you at some point is identifying which partition is which in the event GRUB breaks. On some occasions when that happens, or on Steam Deck, which doesn't support dual booting with SteamOS (if you replace SteamOS entirely, it's not an issue), I've launched an OS by using my BIOS' boot menu instead. In those boot menus, distributions are not always correctly identified. For example, Zorin shows as Ubuntu and Nobara shows as Fedora: their parent distributions.
This should only be an edge case, but it's a good reason to keep notes on which OSes are where on physical drives.
Sounds good! Thanks for sharing the link to it. I might still keep everything separate just to keep things "simple!"
I might end up doing that. It's the registration part that brings out the lazy guy in me.
Does the EFI Partition hold the GRUB? I admit my knowledge about how Grub actually works is quite limited, as I tend to install once and just get on with it. This would be the first time I'm trying more than one distro at a time.
Thank you for the suggestion! I was going to do it anyway for no particular reason, but now I have a strong reason to do it!
Looking at it, it contains some info for GRUB per operating system and EFI files, which I gather are the bridge between firmware and OS. Each OS you install will need space for its own, and will create its own directory under /boot/efi (or I suppose potentially another location, depending on your partitioning). The files aren't very big; it looks like Zorin uses fewer than 5 MB. These days 1 GB is a pittance though, and Nobara specifically recommends being installed before Windows in dual boot configs because Windows doesn't make a large enough EFI partition for itself and Nobara, so running out of space IS possible. With 60 distributions, it's much better to give yourself ample overhead.
I'm just curious about what the use case is for this, if you don't mind sharing some details?
Virtual machines have a performance penalty, yes, but they should be more than enough for most situations. Some of the advantages that you get with this approach are:
Create snapshots of the virtual machine at any given point, and restore from them in case things break.
Backup and restore the virtual machine configuration and/or snapshots taken with other computers for backup or further testing with others i.e., replicate environments across multiple computers.
The ability to run multiple of them at the same time.
The ability to re-allocate resources as needed e.g., expanding storage, RAM, number of processor cores, shared filesystems, etc.
Avoid restarting the computer whenever you need to switch from one distribution to another. Not so much because of the time wasted in this, especially if you have an SSD, but because it forces you to drop what you're doing which can be very frustrating and counter-productive.
Thanks for the explanation! I won't have more than 10, but it's good to know that beforehand!
Two-fold:
Creating distro-specific tutorials.
Just me being in the know.
You're right that VMs can be enough, but I never had a good experience. I ran a few distros in Gnome Boxes and VirtualBox (on Windows), and there's always some sort of scaling or resolution issue. In fact, other than the latest Ubuntu, I had trouble getting all of the distros I tried to go to the native full-screen resolution on my laptop.
Since I won't be doing any actual productivity work (they'll be mainly for screen recording), I don't mind the disruption caused by rebooting. Most, if not all, people creating tutorials are using VMs, and they are perfectly good, I just want the full install.
(And none of them will be my daily driver.)