Considering Mate and Budgie side by side on same disk

brent

I'm going shrink my Budgie partition (takes up whole HDD) and experiment with a side-by-side distro---I've been eager to try Solus Mate for years now.

What should I be mindful of? Have you done it successfully? Is it a bad idea? What will it do to the boot? Will they play nice? Potential weirdness?
Just pickin' brains🙂
Grazioso!

WetGeek

brent I'm going shrink my Budgie partition (takes up whole HDD) and experiment with a side-by-side distro---I've been eager to try Solus Mate for years now.

I sure wish you'd give virtual machines a try. Your Budgie system would support VirtualBox with no problem, and a MATE VM would allow you to learn everything you want to about that DE. You could also create one for GNOME and one for Plasma. And one for Ubuntu Budgie, one for ...

Holler if you want any help getting started. By the time you finish fussing with your dual boot trying to get everything working, you could have installed VirtualBox and created two or three VMs.

brent

can you consider an operating system installed and functional in a VM? thought it was always temporary, ergo turn the VM off and OS disappears.

if I was auditioning again, I would consider a VM. But just want two OS together. In past I installed other distros on the windows SSD. I'd want Mate as a permanent companion/complement to Budgie.

WetGeek

brent can you consider an operating system installed and functional in a VM?

Yeah, And the VM and the host machine (your Budgie) exist simultaneously. You don't need to shut one down to start the other. VMs aren't temporary, unless you create one for a temporary purpose and delete it when you're done with it. I've had VMs that I used for years.

A set of four Solus VMs were active for nearly three years here, getting updated regularly, until recently I crashed my laptop (their host) and had to build them again.

I spent most of today reading a good Nook book on my Windows 10 VM, something I can't do on Linux. It's the only thing I need Windows for, and keeping that VM handy works better for me than any dual-boot scheme. I can change from Windows to Solus with a mouse click.

brent

will do a forum search for two solus distros on same disk but cant even imagine what the search terms would be🙂 for this one...either a half hour joyride or failure. optimistically yours

brent

https://discuss.getsol.us/d/2585-is-it-safe-to-install-mate-along-side-budgie
https://discuss.getsol.us/d/605-complete-install-of-budgie-desktop-aside-mate

helpful (update)

murbert

2 boot (fat32) partitions
2 / (ext4) partitions
Shared swap
Remember to change boot partition flags when installing

brent

murbert
current budgie: sda1,2,&3
unallocated: future home of Mate
plan: make partition the size of the rest of the disk: 167GB, format it gpt (? forgot)

if I just install Mate into gpt(?)-formatted unallocated from live .iso then I don't need to make the fat32 boot and set flags, do I? I don't even have to make the new ext4 partition do I?

how to make shared swap? delete swap in budgie and make a swap that exists in neither partition/new partition (budgie or mate?)

dusting off brain, sorry for so many questions, and thanks for your response

murbert

brent if I just install Mate into gpt(?)-formatted unallocated from live .iso then I don't need to make the fat32 boot and set flags, do I? I don't even have to make the new ext4 partition do I?
How will you get Solus to install on unallocated space? I don't think the installer will do that. There's 3 options that I see.
1-install alongside current os, this will resize the current os and create partitions as needed. This is out as you have resized the existing os already.
2-erase all content and use whole disk. This is out if you want to keep what you have.
3-assign mount points to previously created partitions.
I would make new fat32 (sda4) and ext4 (sda5) partitions in gparted. Hit the check to complete. Then change the sda1 flag to msftdata and the sda4 flag to boot, esp. The installer will give you the opportunity to select previously made partitions to install to. Select sda2, 4 & 5 as appropriate.

brent

murbert thanks.
great tips especially the flags