So I’ve had enough from partitioning my HDD between Linux and Windows, and I want to go full Linux, my laptop is low end and I tend to keep some development services alive when I work on stuff (like MariaDB’s) so I decided to split my HDD into three partitions, a distro (Arch) for my dev stuff, a distro (Pop OS) for gaming, and a huge shared home partition, what are the disadvantages of using a shared home (yes with a shared profile, I still want to access my Steam library from Arch if I want that)
Another thing that concerns me is GRUB, usually when I’m dualbooting with Windows, the Linux distro takes care of the grub stuff, should only a single distro take care of GRUB? or I need to install “the grub package” on both? Do both distros need separate boot partitions? Or a single one for a single distro (like a main distro) will suffice?
Another off topic question, my HDD is partitioned to oblivion, can I safely delete ALL partitions? Including the EFI one? I’m not on a MacBook, a typical 2014 Toshiba that’s my laptop
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I have a triple boot laptop with MX Linux, Void Linux, and OpenBSD on an old laptop where VMing wouldn’t work so well.
As others have pointed out a shared home directory is not a good idea. Shared data (documents, music, images, etc.) would be fine as mentioned previously.
How are you implementing shared data? Soft sym links between homes? Or like a separate folder with a group full access?
Sorry for the really late response. Since one of the OSes is BSD I have one shared FAT32 partition mostly for basic getting-things-from-one-to-the-other stuff. Far as I know OpenBSD does not support ext4 (at least not r/w). It does support ext2.
Since all three OSes have the Nextcloud client it would have been cool to have its directory on a shared partition to reduce redundancy.
I may change things up, format it to ext2 and see if I can use it to share Documents, Music, Pictures, and Video across all three OSes. Maybe.
I see, but FAT32 is pretty limiting for file sizes no?
True. Luckily I don’t have anything large (4GB+). I do plan to change the filesystem. I forgot to mention that I used to have Windows 7 on that old laptop. The other reason why the shared partition was FAT32/vfat.
If you really want to tripleboot Linux, I highly recommend systemd-boot, especially because you are already using Arch, which supports it. I’m sure you could get it to work with Pop.
what are the disadvantages of using a shared home (yes with a shared profile, I still want to access my Steam library from Arch if I want that)
Well, a disavantage I can think of is that if your apps are in different versions, it may be messy. Also, if you share a DE between both environments, it also may become messy
Why don’t you try using only one system and see what happens?
Another thing that concerns me is GRUB, usually when I’m dualbooting with Windows, the Linux distro takes care of the grub stuff, should only a single distro take care of GRUB? or I need to install “the grub package” on both? Do both distros need separate boot partitions? Or a single one for a single distro (like a main distro) will suffice?
Only one system taking care of grub, pls. Grub is already a pain, don’t make it even more painful. If you’re going to config grub, let PopOS handles it. Only install it after Arch and everything should be fine
If it does not recognize Arch, you may wanna enable os-prober at grub conf, but that’s it
Another off topic question, my HDD is partitioned to oblivion, can I safely delete ALL partitions? Including the EFI one? I’m not on a MacBook, a typical 2014 Toshiba that’s my laptop
If you’re ok with losing all the data, it’s okay to wipe out everything and let the distro install itself alone
You might instead consider having two separate user accounts with separate home directories, with symlinks for each to /home/shared or whatever (such as
ln -s /home/shared/Downloads ~/Downloadsfor example.) Much less likely to go wrong in horrible ways.With plain linux that’s a bit complicated to actually dualboot. When booting windows grub just throws the ball to windows bootloader and it manages things from that on, but with grub you’d need to have two separate grub-installations on different partitions so that changes made in Arch doesn’t mess up stuff with PopOS (and other way round). It’s very much doable, but I suppose (without any experience on a setup like that) that if you just go with default options it’ll break something sooner or later and you need to pay attention to grub configs on both sides at all times, so it requires some knowledge. Basically you’d need a grub installed on (as an example) /dev/sda for the system to boot from bios and another grub instance at /dev/sda5 (or whatever you have) for second grub. They’d both have independent /boot directories, grub configs and all the jazz. It’s doable, but as both systems can access either one of the confgurations you really need to pay attention on what’s happening and where.
Mixing home directory with different distros can create issues, as things have slightly different versions of software and their underlying philosophy, specially when mixing different package managers, is a bit different and they might not be compatible with eachother. Personally I would avoid that, but your mileage may vary wildly on how it actually plays out.
For the partitioning, you can safely delete all the partitions, but you’ll of course lose the data on the drive while doing it.
If I’d need such a system I might build a virtual machine to run all the dev stuff and just connect to it from a “real” desktop environment. Essentially mimic a two separate systems where you’ll have a “server” for the dev things and a “desktop” to connect with it. Or if you want a clear separation between the two it’s possible to run a different window manager for each of the tasks and just logout/login to switch between the two and with some scripting/tweaks you can even start/stop services as required when you switch between “modes”. Depending on your needs it might be enough just to run development environment with a virtualbox and start/stop it as needed and adjust the actual desktop experience accordingly.
I don’t understand why would you want to use Arch for dev work and popos for gaming. Arch is not stable and will cause some issues every now and then and PopOS is worse for gaming, but is far more reliable on a production machine.
I use Mint on my gaming PC because I want minimum friction when it’s time to game. It should always just work, never boot up and need to roll back the kernel, Mesa version, etc.
I get that, but if you want to play with new games, the latest mesa is what you want. sings BTRFS song for rollback
For example even on ArchBTW I had to wait more than a month for a Mesa update to fix Alan Wake 2 for me.
kisak-mesa PPA takes about 30 seconds to install and runs great.
Or are you saying you want mesa-git?
You just want to prove that it works, right? Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It’s all linux. Pick one and you’re good to go.
Or, even better, use containers to have access to whatever distro/packaging system you want, like Vanilla OS does.
Not much point if your machine is reasonably up to date, just kvm whatever other distro you want.
