I’m on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I’m content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?
I’d go 1 step further and insist on putting
homeon a separate partition anyway - helps with issues like running out of diskspace.To answer the original question, boot the distro’s ISO from a USB stick and try that (/those) before you actually install anything. You might find some hardware’s not supported (ie wifi) until you do a full install, but at least you can eliminate the distros you don’t like, quickly.
Or 1 step even further and use a btrfs partition with subvolumes for root, home, etc. Then you’re not even stuck with a specific amount of disk space for each. (But you may be limited depending on the specific distro installer support for btrfs. In theory you can always just mount the subvols yourself and point the installer at them, but YMMV).
I recommend keeping a separate boot partition though.
Not sure but it seems to me most major distributions offer you to do a separate /home partition by default? I may be wrong but this happens with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu? Or at least they do recommend to make it that way
It might have to do with my being an old fart, but having at least home on a separate disk or partition seems like basic stuff. I’ve always done it that way.
Of course back in the day, everything had its own partition.
Yeah, I like
/varto be in it’s own partition so I can keep my system(s) under close control, and a separate/bootseems to be necessary these *EFI days