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!!
Why do you want to do this? If it's just to try out different distributions, I would suggest using per-distro virtual machines or USB drives instead.
Well its more than just trying them out, in want to learn and actually use them too. Like as work stations, not just like a live image where you can browse around. Sometimes in get bored of my debian distro and I dont want to just delete it and reinstall another type, ya know? I'd rather have all three where I can actually use and work on them and they all stay in tact and keep all my settings and files and programs, like how a normal desktop installed distro does. More of a learning and adventure thing than anything. One day I could focus on manjaro and then the next work on fedora or if I get bored and just want to casually use my computer I could just hop on my more comfortable debian distro. Idk maybe it seems weird to others, its just how my brain works. I want to be proficient in the big three, plus opensuse eventually too.
Using a USB device might work well for this! You can do basically exactly what you want but your whole OS is on a USB drive. You'll get native performance for everything except disk read/write. If you use a fast device with a fast USB interface you might not even notice.
Do you have a recommended virtualization platform for such a project?
There are a few that are nice.
QEMU-based options work well. Boxes for GNOME uses this.
My backup option is always virtualbox with guest additions installed.