On Sat, 2025-09-13 at 09:59 -0600, home user via users wrote: > The desktop will have two internal drives: one HDD for "user" data, one > M.2(?) NVMe(?) drive for the operating systems and installed > applications. This desktop will not be "DIY"; it's bought from a local > pc store. > > I will want the new desktop to be dual-boot: Fedora Workstation plus one > other Linux distro. I will want Fedora to be the top choice in the grub > menu. If it matters, I'm leaning towards Ubuntu for that second > operating system, but I have a couple reservations/hesitations about that. There's so many ways you can go about this, it's going to be hard to suggest a best way, and for you to decide which way to go. A very simple solution is to partition your operating system drive, reserve a couple of partitions big enough for your intended distros, you don't have to halve it and give each one a massive partition far bigger than it needs. Drives are usually much bigger than needed for the OS, for which using 100 gigs of it would be far more than adequate for most Fedora installations. I'd expect similar for another distro. Leaving some unused space on the drive (if you have one of the new- fangled obscenely huge ones), leaves you options for future experiments. Why dual-boot, though? If you want to try another distro, it might be simpler to just install it by itself and try it out for a while, complication-free. I dual-booted Windows and Linux for a while, when I first tried out Linux (and back then, it was quite ropey, but still much better than Windows 98SE). After a *very* little while I stopped using Windows, completely. I didn't have a need for it, access to data from both of them was a bit of a pain. Maintaining two different OSs was a pain (waste of time and download resources). To be honest, having a second OS on another computer and networking them to a common router is far less painful than dual-booting. Since you're buying a new PC, are you keeping the old one? Install the OS you intend to be your daily driver on the new one, experiment away on the old one. It's a very risk-free way to try things. And you have the other one to research things if the experimental one screws up. As PCs are quite flakey, and various OSs are too, having more than one computer has been quite a godsend when it comes to debugging issues. There's no booting and rebooting back and forth, you can poke away at the problem one as you look up information about it on the other. I've tried Ubuntu in the past, and installed it for other people who've wanted to run away from Windows. They're mostly okay with it, but I found it so radically different than Fedora that it was a headache. Their way of managing software updates, and new software installation, was quite obtuse. Sure, there's a bunch of forums on the net of people resolving issues with it, but I found it full of Windows refugees, and quite un-knowledgable ones, with the blind leading the blind in trying crazy ways to manage problems. I've installed Linux Mint for other windows refugees (they chose it), it's based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. Debian is one of the well-respected distros, Ubuntu is still thought of as some kind of bastard child by others. Mint seems to be thought of a bit better than Ubuntu, not really sure why. Possibly the one advantage Ubuntu may have is that they're not that concerned about breaching patents and other uncumberances, you may have access to things that Fedora won't touch, for example. If you want to try something even more different, you could try one of the BSDs, it's a Unix not a Linux system. Some of which are really highly regarded. Even if you only intend to single-boot, partitioning your boot drive to have a large space for it to run in, and empty space left on the drive has another advantage. If you decide to install the next version of Fedora, for instance, you can do so into the extra space. Leaving a fully working current version of the OS, and an isolated installation of the next release. Sometimes a new release can be gorey nightmare, or you might deliberately decide to try the test versions. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
