Installing multiple desktop environments

Yeah it’s pretty great to not have to hack up the drive into partitions and resize filesystems to install a new distro. Once you get the hang of it, you set up an installation in whatever time the installer takes (ten minutes?), poke around for an hour or whatever, then blow the subvolumes away when you are done if you’d like and it’s as if they were never there.

It’s true, you may break things by sharing the entire home subvolume. There are ways around this, for example you can make smaller “safer” subvolumes within the home subvolume and have each system share the smaller subvolumes.

Another approach that I do on my own systems (I find it cleaner and simpler than having tons of subvolumes) is set up a “shared” subvolume, to be mounted by all installations. Then I move some common directories (the home folders like Documents, Downloads, etc, and some config files I want shared) into that, and symlink them in the appropriate directory path for each installation. That way, no matter what installation I boot into I have all my stuff, but at the same time each installation can have its own dot files, etc.

If you are interested, I detailed a somewhat exaggerated example of this kind of setup (with thirteen different Garuda Linux installations) here:

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