im currently dual booting endevouros with windows, and i have a lot of free/unpartitioned space on my drive. can i install another linux distro alongside endevour and windows? i have a separate home partition as well. do i only keep one linux/grub boot partition? im not too scared of nuking everything but id obv rather not. thanks!
Sure. After you’ve installed it, add its entry to your bootloader.
There really isn’t any technical limit of how many OSes you can install aside from space. Have 500 Alpine installations if you want. All good.
ok thank you 🙂
Depending on what’s your usecase, or what you want to achieve, running different distros on different virtual machines may be the best solution for you.
thats what im doing right now. its not as sexy as running baremetal, but boy do i love not worrying about bootloaders
Gparted should help you manage your partitions. Be very careful to pick the right partition to format. Also, Windows is known to sometimes mess up dualboots, it thinks it is the only OS.
thanks. if i never update windows (even if it tries to force me to), is it possible for it to break it ?
Containers or VMs sound like a much easier solution. But I guess a good question is, why do you want multiple OSs?
But I guess a good question is, why do you want multiple OSs?
Agreed. Is it cool you can do this? Sure… why not. Is it valuable/useful in any way? No.
I’m an old grey beard at this point though… The days of being interested in the latest OS or distro hopping are long loooong behind me.
Out of curiosity, which one did you stick with?
Mint with Cinnamon on the desktop because it’s not flashy or unique in any way. I have actual work to get done and I just need the OS to get out of my way. I’ll customize my shell environment but only for productivity… I’m not spending hours tweaking my DE theme or color palette or whatever.
Server side, where I spend the overwhelming majority of my time, the base OS doesn’t really matter. I am entirely in kubernetes so that’s mostly all abstracted away.
My usual setup is two distros, sometimes also Windows. I use one home partition, one swap partition, one EFI partition (Windows creates one in EFI mode) and each OS its own root partition.
Some people won’t recommend sharing a home partition, but it has worked for me for a long time now. Some years ago I’d have an additional data partition, with symlinks from each home folder of each distro for Videos, Documents, Images, etc. Each distro was contained, even home, in the root partition.
Also, you can have several bootloaders in the EFI partition as long as you don’t wipe/format it. Usually, you can choose which one to use in the firmware settings.
You can. Be aware that using one home partition for numerous distros is not recommended because of config files conflict. You can however symlink between home partitions.
