Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?

Macaroni9538@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 48 points –

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!!

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Why?

Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don't know how to partition a disk. I'd want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.

If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what's working/broken go for the triple boot.

Docker could be worth a shot. You can 'docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever' and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn't too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.

But with virtualization or containerization, is there persistence for the distros? I think thats the right word. Like does it remember everything I tweak or install? I'm not necessarily wanting to just browse new distros, I want to learn them and use them too and if a VM wipes the image every time, thats not useful for me

Yes it does

I'm sorry yes it does wipe after each use or yes it does keep things in tact?

Keeps things intact. Try Parallels (I use it at work and it’s not free, but I’m pretty sure there are some great free alternatives)

Parallels as in parallel computing? Or are those different terms?