I'd like to install linux mint xfce 21.3 and xubuntu 24.04 alongside the already present debian 12.5, but I don't know if I have to create the partitions before installing or if I'm guided to create the partitions while installing.
On debian 12.5 there are 3 partitions already: /boot/efi, /boot and nvme0 without a mount point, which I encrypted. I used lsblk to get this information.
Incidentally I ask: in the encrypted partition I reserved 50% of space for my home directory, created LV (logical volumes) for /var (9.2GiB) and /tmp (2 GiB) as well. Can I edit the size of these LV?
The other question is, am I installing too many distros on the same computer? CPU is an Intel Core i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz
Get a second ssd, I'm sure your PC has a placeholder for it. Normally, I'd say that you simply resize your main / partition using gparted, however, because it's encrypted this might be dicey. Hence, get a second SSD.
btrfs with subvolumes. I have fedora gnome, fedora kde, debian 12 kde, arch mate as subvolumes on the same disk and of course a home subvolume that they all mount on boot, so all my data is always available.
Yes. You can use
lvresizeto reduce the size of your logical volumes.You first need to shrink the filesystems using e.g.
resize2fs(exact command depends on filesystem). See the manpage for details, but for shrinking the filesystem it needs to be unmounted, so you'll need to do this from a live usb or something.After that you can use
lvresizeto resize the logical volumes. Pro tip: You can shrink the filesystem to e.g. 20 GiB, but shrink the partition to 30 GiB, just to make sure you're not cutting off the filesystem due to some slight error or inexactness, and then afterwards runresize2fsagain to resize the filesystem back to fill the whole partition, which it does by default if you don't specify any size.Also note, since you have LVM-on-LUKS, when you boot into a live cd, you will need to first use
cryptsetupto decrypt your partition, and then runvgscanto make lvm find the unecrypted partition.
