Dual-booting as an intermediate phase for fully switching OSs
Hi all,
I'm currently using Zorin OS, but I'd like to perhaps explore other Linux distributions. Is it possible to dual-boot another distro, and then if I'm satisfied and after having installed all the apps I need, to erase my Zorin OS partition and only use the other, new distro?
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You can install as many as will fit on the drive, there's no limit other than your own sanity
But will I be able to eventually remove OS #1 and switch to the one installed afterwards?
Yes, you just boot a live USB and use GParted to delete what you don't want anymore and grow the rest.
Based. Btrfs it is. Sounds like a really cool filesystem.
If you're using BTRFS and know how to/are prepared to learn, just create separate sub volumes instead of multiple partitions. Means that you don't need to decide how to split up space between different partitions and they are easy to delete without a live USB.
You can always slap LVM or btrfs or ZFS on top to get more. But even with something more basic like ext4 you can still install multiple distros as long as they're in their own folder, and when you pivot root you pivot to a folder of it, it doesn't have to be the root of any filesystem. If you have a BIOS system technically you don't even need a partition table as syslinux fits the ext4 header and can boot from ext4.
I'd probably just do btrfs subvolumes or ZFS datasets though, more reliable and more manageable. And you don't waste space with individual partitions either.
i've found that lots of distros do not behave well with mutiple boot scenarios and will overwrite the boot information for existing installs
Using a third-party boot manager like rEFInd helps to bridge the gap with dubious motherboards that don't implement the UEFI spec right. Just make sure all the installed distros have their own ESP, then you can get into whatever distro's GRUB via rEFInd. And it's pretty.
The issue is usually around fighting for the same ESP, and not all distro's GRUB finding the other distros, and made worse by some UEFI firmwares not offering all available EFI applications as bootable so you end up stuck with the wrong GRUB.
If you use refind why bother with grub? Isn't it superfluous?
Yes, definitely is. Just assuming here OP doesn't want to configure a bootloader manually, so it's easier to just jump into whichever distro's default GRUB.
It's not like you need a bootloader anyway, you can just add direct boot entries with efibootmgr and not use a bootloader at all.