this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
33 points (97.1% liked)

Linux

48209 readers
896 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How are you implementing shared data? Soft sym links between homes? Or like a separate folder with a group full access?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I see, but FAT32 is pretty limiting for file sizes no?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

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.