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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You only need mount points in each distro for partitions that you want to be able to access from that distro. If you don’t need access to your Arch system files from Debian, don’t mount the Arch partition in Debian.

    But if you have a partition that you want to access from multiple distros, you don’t need to use the same mountpoint in each distro - just like a USB flash drive can be E:\ on one Windows computer and H:\ on another - that is just a name and the files on it are the same.


  • Mount points are specific to one install - for example, you can mount your Manjaro root partition as /mnt/manjaro on Fedora. From every distro’s perspective, the partition it is installed on is /.

    You seem to be mixing up the locations of partitions and mount points - a partition is somewhere on a disk and a mount point is basically a sign that points to it, and every distro can have different signs that point to the same thing.


  • You can only mount one partition at one mount point, but any empty directory on one partition can be a mount point for another partition.

    GPT is a partition table and is not used for Linux specifically, but on any computer with UEFI - it defines how to find partitions on a disk, but not how they are formatted.

    ext4 is a filesystem - formatting a partition with ext4 means creating data structures that tell the OS where to find files and directories in the partition.








  • There are no BIOS partitions - you may be confusing the term with the BIOS partition scheme, but that doesn’t matter in this context “BIOS partitions” do exist, but they are irrelevant on modern machines - they are for booting GPT disks on systems that only support MBR disks.

    If you need an EFI partition, the first installer will create one. As for the sizes, the recommendation in the other comment makes sense to me (one ≈60 GB partition per distro, one swap partition and one partition for your personal files that uses the remaining space on the disk).



  • A swap partition doesn’t have a filesystem - it has its own partition type and doesn’t contain files. The installer might create one automatically or it might not - if it asks how large it should be, a good rule of thumb is to use the same size as your RAM.

    If that turns out not to be enough, you can create a swap file on a data partition later and if it’s too large, you just wasted a few GB but usually that doesn’t matter.