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
It's just unnecessarily complicated. Just pick one Linux. I did both coding and gaming on NixOS.
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 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.
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.
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.
The typical distro's installer will just take care of setting up GRUB for you, don't worry about that. I'm doing something similar with my home partition, except I made a home partition with all the expected user folders ~/Videos ~/Documents ~/Music ~/Games etc and then used overlayFS which keeps ~/.config/ and the like separate for each OS partition while letting me share everything else.
I was dualbooting 2 Linuxes for a long time. All that you need is to install GRUB once on one of the distros, but having two or more bootloaders in the same EFI System partition is generally harmless, and might happen due to how some distros' installers are written. In that case the BIOS boot order will decide which one to use. Either way, you only need one boot partition.
It is safe to delete all partitions on your hard drive if and only if you have backed up any important data on them. It's basically the same as installing a new hard drive. The installer for your distro will be able to re-create all of them.
I have personally never used a shared /home between multiple distros, but based on my experience switching desktop environments, there are likely to be conflicts between files that lead to bugs. Arch and Pop!_OS will have vastly different versions of most software, and it's possible that changes to a config file in one distro may break the program in the other. Shared /home is better for if you have just one OS installed, and reinstall it occasionally.
