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
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.
It’s just unnecessarily complicated. Just pick one Linux. I did both coding and gaming on NixOS.
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.
Why bother with Pop!_OS when you’re comfortable with Arch? Arch is, in my opinion, better for gaming just due to its newer packages, and certainly its newer Kernel. I’ve been running EndeavourOS which is basically just pre packaged Arch, and it handles all of my gaming and productivity tasks more to my liking than any Ubuntu based distro, certainly better than Pop! did.
Also, I see no reason why you shouldn’t delete all of your old partitions and start fresh, but when you do, give EndeavourOS a whirl and see if it handles all of your dev tasks and gaming. I think you’re over complicating your system and not getting any tangible return from dual booting Pop!
As an alternative suggestion, you could use bazzite (atomic fedora built for gaming) and add an arch compartment for coding stuff.
Bazzite just runs games out of the box, it’s soooo convenient.
Not much point if your machine is reasonably up to date, just kvm whatever other distro you want.
