SSD Partitioning: Fedora and Mint on a Single Drive

Ask Fedora
1

Hello everyone,

I want to share my PC’s SSD between Fedora and Linux Mint, and I’ve been trying different partitioning configurations.

Currently, I have this setup on my PC with 16 GB of RAM, and Mint is managing the GRUB:

sda1 EFI (from Fedora)
sda2 / (Fedora)
sda3 EFI (from Mint)
sda4 / (Mint)
sda5 /home (shared)

Still, I keep asking myself these questions:

  1. Do you think it’s necessary to have two EFI partitions (one for each distro)?
  2. What do you think about sharing the /home partition?
  3. Are you still using a SWAP partition?

Thank you in advance for your time and comments.

Best regards.

2

Numbered responses

  1. No, as long as they are different distro bases.
    Having 2 fedora based OSes probably would require different efi partitions, but one fedora and one ubuntu based distro could share the efi partition.
  2. Sharing /home may become problematic.
    The app config files that are placed under your home directory (particularly .config, .cache and .local as well as app specific dot files) may be inconsistent between the distros and could easily lead to hard to identify performance issues.
  3. For most home users a swap partition is not required since zram manages the swap quite nicely. In some cases it may be required to have additional swap for heavily loaded systems. This can be determined through use and watching how much swap is actually tasked. I have not needed additional swap except for one task, one time, since zram was introduced. That swap was used once then removed.

Note that from personal preference I would have fedora manage grub. Whichever OS was last updated with new kernel or anything else that would require an update to grub.cfg – that OS likely will take control of grub.

You did not stated the filesystem in use. If using ext4 for / then a separate /boot partition is not required, but if using btrfs it generally requires a separate /boot as ext4.

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3

thank you very much, @computersavvy

Do you think this would be a good configuration?

sda1 EFI (shared)
sda2 / (Fedora)
sda3 /home (Fedora)
sda4 / (Mint)
sda5 /home (Mint)

4

Since you seem to want to share things between the systems, Maybe create one additional partition to only contain data and mount it somewhere like /home/USER/data. Mount that one at the same location on both systems then you could have data files there which could be shared without the potential interactions/conflicts with sharing home directories.

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5

In the end, to avoid any future inconvenience, I installed only Linux Mint with this configuration.

sda1 EFI fat32 1 GiB
sda2 / ext4 90 GiB
sda3 /home ext4 356 GiB

What do you think?

Then I’m going to install Fedora on another disk.

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