About 6 months ago I came up with a fun idea for a project. I realized it should be possible to multi-boot several distros out of a single zpool using zfs and systemd-boot. So I went about testing it out. Sure enough, I was able to get Manjaro, Arch and Nixos booting out of a single zpool which m…

I was more interested in multi-boot when I first started exploring linux. But keeping all of them up to date wore thin. Now I run one linux (updated) and a non-updated windows on each system. I don’t run windows enough to have a high security risk. An installed backup distro concept has merit, b…

I don’t multi-boot, I see no reason to do so, and even if I did, I couldn’t be bothered to… One OS per machine is quite enough for me. In the extremely rare situations that I need something different than EndeavourOS, I either boot up a live image, or use a virtual machine. Or I use one of a dozen …

Reasons to multi-boot: Because I can - lotsa room, and data on a separate drive Allows testing of things I’m pretty sure I don’t want on my daily driver - including troubleshooting for others. Always have a ‘backup’ system ready to go if trouble comes. I can’t update them all at the same time! All…

I use multi boot because sometimes I feel like trying out new distributions.

Playing devil’s advocate … can this experimentation not be done easier in VMs, rather than bare metal installs? You have to reboot to use another bare metal OS, and with VMs you can have many virtual systems running concurrently, only really limited by available memory. Snapshot management in VBox…

I have tried VMs, and they have their advantages (as you mention) but I have had poor luck with VBox (except with playing card games on Windows - all it’s good for), and insufficient time to familiarise myself with qemu properly. On top of that, there are distros out there that do not work the same …

[image] freebird54: In addition, I work with rEFInd (and other) booting solutions which of course are not testable in VM environments. You should be able to test refind in a VM.

You know what they say about assume - perhaps it has struck again! Would it depend on which VM solution was in use?

[image] freebird54: Would it depend on which VM solution was in use? I suppose it could but I can’t think of one off the top of my head that wouldn’t support it. I have tested all flavors of boot managment solutions in a VM. Honestly, stuff like that is easier to test in a VM because of sna…