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Do you dual/ triple boot with any Linux distro's?

Diesel79

Diesel79

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 3, 2013
230
244
UK
Hi guys,

I'm just wondering how many of you dual or triple boot your Mac with a Linux distro/s? I'm currently dual booting Mavericks with Ubuntu 13.10 and I have a third partition ready for when Linux Mint 16 goes final next week.

I've also been playing around with Arch Linux in a vm, but it's going to take a while before I feel comfortable enough with Arch to install it for real.

So do you dual boot with a Linux distro?

Thanks in advance.
 
I don't currently, but I have triple booted without problems.
However, it is important to keep the drive in GPT - ie don't let Bootcamp loose (or create a ms-dos partition with disk utility) as a hybrid mbr is created, limiting partition numbers.
 
Why Ubuntu and Mint (Ubuntu)?

It would seem to me that the extra partition would be better served by something not Ubuntu, Fedora perhaps.

You're never going to learn Arch by playing with it you kinda either "get" it and it picks you or you don't. If you want to play with something in virtual Gentoo is what you play with.

I use Arch daily it takes a bit of commitment because it's going to break. Recently as in last weekend the new nVidia driver hit the repos and took out X, and my DE (Cinnamon). It also took those out while it was in testing sooo..
 
MyMac1976 said:
Why Ubuntu and Mint (Ubuntu)?

It would seem to me that the extra partition would be better served by something not Ubuntu, Fedora perhaps.

You're never going to learn Arch by playing with it you kinda either "get" it and it picks you or you don't. If you want to play with something in virtual Gentoo is what you play with.

I use Arch daily it takes a bit of commitment because it's going to break. Recently as in last weekend the new nVidia driver hit the repos and took out X, and my DE (Cinnamon). It also took those out while it was in testing sooo..
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice it's much appreciated. I'm thinking of installing Manjaro on my third partition now. I've just been testing the water with Arch in a vm, to be honest I followed a tutorial on youtube on how to install it. But I gathered myself that Arch is something that needs commitment, very, very nice OS though. Thanks again.
 
Diesel79 said:
Thanks for the advice it's much appreciated. I'm thinking of installing Manjaro on my third partition now. I've just been testing the water with Arch in a vm, to be honest I followed a tutorial on youtube on how to install it. But I gathered myself that Arch is something that needs commitment, very, very nice OS though. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Manjaro or Archbang would be my picks for futzing but they still need to be updated frequently.
 
MyMac1976 said:
Manjaro or Archbang would be my picks for futzing but they still need to be updated frequently.
Click to expand...

Thanks I'll check out Archbang. So I gather that anything based on Arch is less stable than say mint? I've read that Arch uses bleeding edge software, so maybe it's more hassle than it's worth? I'd like to learn how to set up Arch correctly but it seems like a massive time investment. Thanks again.
 
Diesel79 said:
Thanks I'll check out Archbang. So I gather that anything based on Arch is less stable than say mint? I've read that Arch uses bleeding edge software, so maybe it's more hassle than it's worth? I'd like to learn how to set up Arch correctly but it seems like a massive time investment. Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Manjaro will be more stable than vanilla Arch or Archbang because they maintain their own repos. The problem is you learn less and the community is much smaller. You can't ask questions about Manjaro in the arch forums because it's to different. Archbang you can you just don't say anything about it being ArchBang.

Arch is for people that want the latest software and kernel not people craving the ultimate in stability. There is about a bazillion distro's out there just try them all one will be right. Every distro has it's quirks and it's market, I know Arch is popular right now but it's just not for everyone. I hang out on linuxquestions.org a lot that there is alot of Slackware users there, slackers are good folks but Slackware has no appeal to me.

I always liked what Clem and team did with the GUI but don't like the slowness of updates and the need to re-install every six months. After the took away the ability away to upgrade to the next release I left the Mint world for good. All my mint people are on something else now. I love the heck out of Cinnamon and Mate so I use Cinnamon on Arch, it give me a unified GUI and the underpinnings I prefer.

You could try a vanilla Debian install apt-get makes me want to poke a stick in my eye but most people like it and it's super stable. I guess in the end try a distro that will force you into the command line If you're going to stick to GUI based distros developed by a company then OS X is the best of the bunch.
 
MyMac1976 said:
Manjaro will be more stable than vanilla Arch or Archbang because they maintain their own repos. The problem is you learn less and the community is much smaller. You can't ask questions about Manjaro in the arch forums because it's to different. Archbang you can you just don't say anything about it being ArchBang.

Arch is for people that want the latest software and kernel not people craving the ultimate in stability. There is about a bazillion distro's out there just try them all one will be right. Every distro has it's quirks and it's market, I know Arch is popular right now but it's just not for everyone. I hang out on linuxquestions.org a lot that there is alot of Slackware users there, slackers are good folks but Slackware has no appeal to me.

I always liked what Clem and team did with the GUI but don't like the slowness of updates and the need to re-install every six months. After the took away the ability away to upgrade to the next release I left the Mint world for good. All my mint people are on something else now. I love the heck out of Cinnamon and Mate so I use Cinnamon on Arch, it give me a unified GUI and the underpinnings I prefer.

You could try a vanilla Debian install apt-get makes me want to poke a stick in my eye but most people like it and it's super stable. I guess in the end try a distro that will force you into the command line If you're going to stick to GUI based distros developed by a company then OS X is the best of the bunch.
Click to expand...

Thanks again for the advice. I think I'll invest some time in learning Arch. You make a good point about using GUI based distros.
 
screen shot when it's done
 

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Diesel79 said:
That looks amazing, I imagine it took some time to get it looking that good. That's it now I'm determined that only Arch will do.
Click to expand...

That the nice part about Linux, you can make it look like anything you want. I choose a hybrid..

There are many people who literally tweak everything I don't have the desire to do all that so I just used a theme for Cinnamon and black cairo dock.
 
Quackers said:
Is that a conky/lua output I see on the right?
Click to expand...

Conky, I use conky manager it's got about 300 scripts to choose from. I'm to lazy to write conky scripts just like I'm to lazy to write geek tool scripts. That one isn't in your face and gives all the info.
 
MyMac1976 said:
Conky, I use conky manager it's got about 300 scripts to choose from. I'm to lazy to write conky scripts just like I'm to lazy to write geek tool scripts. That one isn't in your face and gives all the info.
Click to expand...

Thanks for making me aware of conky manager :)
 
Basically it's a waste of time/space dualbooting different Linux distributions.

Using different Linux distributions or LiveCDs as utility-disks is OK.

But exchanging one Ubuntu (or another GUI dist) for the other ? Waste of time.

Take a base distro: Debian, Gentoo, ArchLinux, or even FreeBSD - master it, and don't waste more time on the GUI dists.

Just convince yourself you need to spend your holidays reading the handbook/manual for any base distro, install your own windowmanager like Openbox, get to know the shell, don't be scared. You'll think this is the best investment in your time for the rest of your days.
 
Last edited:
dza said:
Basically it's a waste of time/space dualbooting different Linux distributions.

Using different Linux distributions or LiveCDs as utility-disks is OK.

But exchanging one Ubuntu (or another GUI dist) for the other ? Waste of time.

Take a base distro: Debian, Gentoo, ArchLinux, or even FreeBSD - master it, and don't waste more time on the GUI dists.

Just convince yourself you need to spend your holidays reading the handbook/manual for any base distro, install your own windowmanager like Openbox, get to know the shell, don't be scared. You'll think this is the best investment in your time for the rest of your days.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice dza I appreciate it. I think I'm going to get stuck into Arch :)
 
dza said:
No problem! Actually I was thinking I wasn't going to put this down so easily - but there is a grain of truth in it, although it's not a perfectly neutral opinion.

I've explained in more detail "why" here in my collection:
http://w0lf.quora.com/Starting-with-Linux-From-novice-to-Pro
Click to expand...

Thanks again dza. I'm now following you on Quora and I'm going to read your articles. I've decided that I'm going to wipe Ubuntu and Just dual boot with OS X and Arch, I'm just going to get stuck in no matter how long it takes me.
 
Diesel79 said:
Thanks again dza. I'm now following you on Quora and I'm going to read your articles. I've decided that I'm going to wipe Ubuntu and Just dual boot with OS X and Arch, I'm just going to get stuck in no matter how long it takes me.
Click to expand...

Write it all down! I have a little book that says everything I've done it's like a check sheet incase I have to rebuild the system. I keep In essence a GM of my install and re-clone every time I make an actual improvement. The first time I installed it took about 6 hours to get to a GUI not it takes about less than a half hour
 
MyMac1976 said:
Write it all down! I have a little book that says everything I've done it's like a check sheet incase I have to rebuild the system. I keep In essence a GM of my install and re-clone every time I make an actual improvement. The first time I installed it took about 6 hours to get to a GUI not it takes about less than a half hour
Click to expand...

Thanks! I'm now running Arch with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Could you tell me how to install concky manager on Arch please? I've been to the CM site and pasted this command into terminal yaourt -S conky-manager-bzr but I just get an error saying: bash: yaourt: command not found. Thanks in advance.
 
Diesel79 said:
Thanks! I'm now running Arch with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Could you tell me how to install concky manager on Arch please? I've been to the CM site and pasted this command into terminal yaourt -S conky-manager-bzr but I just get an error saying: bash: yaourt: command not found. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

You have to install yaourt
 
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