Oh “great”, more crap between Ctrl and Alt.

[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!

Those were probably genuine, clueless people being clueless. For trolling you don’t ask “am I pregnant?”, you ask “I’m pregnant and [my brother | my dog | I don’t know who] is the father, what should I do?”.

Starting to wish yahoo answers would come back.

Fuck, I miss trolling in Yahoo answers.

You’re welcome! It ain’t much but it’s honest work. I also have other scripts that I don’t mind sharing, but they’re mostly dumb stuff, like a simple autoclick using xdotool.

This is great! It looks more serious than my method, that smells “dirty hack” from a distance. Glad to see other people tacking the UX issue.

I used Pluma to do this, so the issue is mostly Lemmy. (IIRC the devs did this to avoid some XSS).

I’m aware of the ``` mark-up (I didn’t use it to highlight the code in pink - useful to set it apart from the comments), is there another?

(I also had to replace the angle brackets with ⟨⟩, glad that I had those due to Linguistics. Otherwise Lemmy just noms on them for breakfast.)

NOTE: Lemmy is hellbent on replacing the “&” in the code with “& amp;”. You’ll probably want to undo it before running this code.

If you’re considering Xfce, there’s also Mate (the one that I use). Mint has rather good support to it, and it’s basically GNOME 2 being updated by another team.

Damn, that was a shame. Worth a try.

I am not sure on what I’m going to say, but then it’s possible that Cinnamon only allows you to do it through theme customisation. So one of the things that you could do is to look for Cinnamon spices (I think that’s how it calls its themes?) with the words “small” and “title bar”.

I don’t use Cinnamon, but try to change the size of the font used by the title bar, in “Cinnamon Settings”. It might do the trick.

It’s less messy than it looks like.

Physically you’d have N+2 partitions for N systems: one for swap, another for storage, and N for system files. Then inside each system you’d have simply to mount the swap, /, and /home/user/storage.

I recommended OP to turn EFI off, it sounds pointless in his situation. Regarding /boot: it boils down to installing grub in one of those distros, and letting it manage the boot.

Fedora’s swap on zram shouldn’t pose a problem - at most it won’t use the disk swap, but other distros still would.

Encryption is important but I wonder if OP would make much use out of it, given that he plans to bulk store his items in the cloud. The storage partition would be mostly for things “at hand”. And if necessary, as you said, some elbow grease lets you have encryption and still access it from all distros.

I don’t recommend OP to mount that partition directly to /home itself. It’s bound to create problems later on due to software in different versions interacting with software that may or may not be present depending on the distro. Mounting it inside some other directory (even inside /home, e.g. /home/username/storage) feels considerably safer.

You don’t need to create a storage partition if you don’t want to. You could theoretically reduce that partition table from the diagram to three partitions - one for each distro. It’s up to you, really.

The problem that I see with that is organisation and security:

• you’ll likely use one distro more than the other two. That distro’s partition will get full of personal files faster. Eventually you’ll need to juggle files to the other two partitions.
• you’ll need to remember which system you were using in order to remember where your files are. And since you’ll be juggling files back and forth, you’ll reach a point where you need to search three directories to find a file.
• if your personal files are spread across multiple partitions, you’ll likely need to mount all of them in all your systems. This means that you’ll need to mount Debian’s and RHEL’s partitions in Arch, Arch’s and Debian’s in RHEL, etc. It’s generally not a good idea to mount partitions with system files unnecessarily.

Yup. Check the diagram that I posted as a reply to another comment. It’s a clean way and it allows you to access your files from all your distros.

At least in theory you could even use a /home partition if you really, really wanted, but then you’d need to make sure that your username is different for each distro. It’s more work than it’s worth, and muscle memory will make you to try to log into one system with the username of another system.

I think that this might help you, since you said that you mentioned diagrams:

The numbers after /dev/sda will change depending on how you partition your SSD, as well as their order, and I’m assuming that your username will be “macaroni” for simplicity, but look at the idea. (Also, you don’t need to mount your personal files partition in /home/macaroni/storage. It could be mounted anywhere you want, even /randomjunk/catpix/dogpix/mypartition.)

If I recall correctly you don’t need to mount the partition with grub (the bootloader), but do check it with other users as I’m not sure of that. Once you update grub in that distribution, it’ll automatically detect “look! There are other systems here! I’ll add them to the boot options!”.

Also, someone mentioned creating the partition first. how would that work out if you’re still running a distro?

You should only create, delete or modify partitions of your SSD from a live USB. Never do it while the system installed in your SSD is running. Those partitions will stay even after you reboot.

I recommend creating the partitions first, then installing your distros. This way you’ll have better control on how to organise your partitions. For example, if you decide to install Arch on the third partition, you can simply say it “hey, you shall be installed in /dev/sda3”, no matter the order that you’re installing Arch vs. other distros.

/home is a directory (“folder”). Inside that directory, there’s one subdirectory for each user, where you’re expected to keep your personal files, configuration files, user data from software (e.g. save games from your games), stuff like this, personal data.

And Linux allows you to mount any partition in any directory of your choice.

Because of those two things, a lot of people create a partition and mount it as /home. So if something bad happens with the distro, and you need to reinstall it, your princess is in another castle your data is in another partition, safely stored. It’s usually a good idea, but in your case it’s a bad idea - because your /home/[insert username] directory from one distro will be likely the same as in the other distros, so they’ll interfere on each other, and software user data will become a mess.

Instead, what I recommend you is to not create a /home partition. Let each distro have its own /home. However, do create a partition to store your data, and mount it inside your /home/[insert your username] directory. That way you can access all your files from all your distros, but the software user data won’t be mixed.

If this is a plain computer (desktop/laptop): I’d simply turn EFI off and call it a day.

Also, how exactly do you choose a default bootloader when each distro automatically installs their own?

I’d probably let Debian or LMDE do it simply because I’m more used to those distros, but you can simply roll a die if you want.

Or, if you already chose which distro should manage boot, and you want to know how to do it - the tutorial in the link does the trick. I’ll adapt and copypaste a simplified version here:

And just now I realised that some random distro might decide to take over the boot, once it updates kernel (as it triggers updating grub). So when installing the other distros, look for some configuration that allows you to not install grub in it. (It’s also possible to remove it after the installation of the distro.)

Or do things like display managers matter? or is Xorg or Wayland pretty much good for all three?

That’s a per-distro choice, you could go with Wayland for some and Xorg for others. I would probably go with Xorg for all three because it works for me.

All those distros are compatible with grub, and come with their own copies of it. You just need to install your distros, and then when you say “I want THIS ONE to manage boot”, you follow this tutorial. (It’s supposed to help you reinstalling grub after Windows, but it works fine for grub after another Linux instal).

Or, if you want to be lazy - install last the distro that you want to manage boot, then tell it “screw the current boot, reinstall it”.

I wouldn’t bother with a bootloader partition. The bootloader runs fine from any distro partition, and it’s small enough so you don’t need to worry about it wasting space.

swap

I’ve been running my system without swap whatsoever for quite some time, and it runs fine. But if you’re planning to use hibernation or similar, reserve the same amount of swap space as you have RAM; for example if you have 8GB RAM then at least 8GB swap.

IMPORTANT: if hibernating a distro, don’t boot another distro, otherwise the hibernation data will get wiped.

Warning: this is definitively doable, but messier than it looks like. I’d recommend you to partition it manually, before installing any distro, like this:

• one partition per distro. For sizes check their requirements. Given 500GB I’d probably reserve 60GB for each, perhaps a bit more if I know that I’ll install a lot of stuff in that distro.
• one swap partition, that’ll be accessed across distros. Optional if you have 16GB+ of RAM.
• use the leftover space for a “storage” partition, for personal files that you won’t save in someone else’s computer (i.e. the cloud). That allows you to mess with the distros without risking your personal files.

Don’t worry too much on getting the space right though - if necessary you can always resize a few partitions after installation. It’s a bit of a bother though.

Do not share /home across distros, it’s simply more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, mount that “storage” partition in each distro, inside your /home/[$username] directory.

Another thing that you might want to consider is virtualisation. Odds are that you won’t use a lot of those distros in your everyday, and that you’re just curious about their differences. In that case, consider installing one of them, install Virtualbox in it, and then the other distros get installed inside Virtualbox. I’m suggesting that because it’ll use overall less space, and make distro management less messy.