Hello Comrades,
Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more.
I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux.
Question about storage and swap memory.
I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.
The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?
And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them ‘share’ the swap partition?
Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?
If you have a reasonable amount of RAM, you don’t even need swap, but it depends on what you need. If you do need it, it should be on your fastest drive, but it doesn’t need to be large, even something like 2 GB can be enough. You can share swap between OSes that shouldn’t be an issue, you will just to manually configure it with each one.
Also, as someone already said it might be a good idea, if you want to try multiple distros to share your home folder between OSes it should make things easier for you and save some space as well. Overall, 256 GB if you want to install multiple distros is pretty small, but it depends on what you install/what distro it is. Remember to partition your drive well, it is annoying to have to resize your disk partitions with data on it.
