Fedora 43 Workstation & Fedora 43 KDE Plazma Dual boot

Ask Fedora
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1

I have Fedora Workstation 43 - had it since 39 (upgraded each year to newer version) - on Lenovo ThinkBook 15 G4. I thought about giving KDE Plazma a try, so I installed a second m.2 drive, prepared a F43 KDE usb installer using Fedora Media Writer. I booted from the usb drive and started the installer. I cannot see any option that would allow me to install F43 Plazma in dual boot with my F43 Gnome Workstation.

I set language options, choose the second (new) drive and the only option available is “Use entire disk” and install.

Is it even possible to have two Fedora 43 versions on one notebook (on separate disks)?

2

You should be able to install kde on the 2nd drive then use the UEFI BIOS boot menu to pick which disk you boot from.

3

This seems like a way around the problem. I thought there was a way to let the installer know there is already an efi partition and make it add it’s enrty to it.

4

Are you hoping that the grub menu will allow you to switch abd avoid the bios menu?
That is not supported.

5

Not a chance. Fedora creates a specific grub.cfg file in /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/ that redirects grub to the real grub.cfg file in /boot/grub2/

Installing a second version of fedora using the same efi partition would overwrite that file then only boot the latest installed version

Use the above advice and install clean onto the second drive, then use the bios boot menu to select which to boot.