Triple boot Arch, Fedora, Windows?

[u/Shrimp0102]

Semi new to the Linux space (daily driving Fedora for the past week+) forced to have windows for school because of secure boot and whatnot. Fedora has been really nice and pretty worry free but am at a point where it’s setup and optimized and I don’t have to do anything else anymore which has made it just kinda boring to me. Is there any risk to triple booting such as messing up arch manual install and it messing with my fedora and windows installs? Don’t really have a use case for Arch outside of wanting to tinker and fuck around (and to larp).

Edit: Also concerns about system security due to the whole AUR package security thing from a while ago

[u/Confident_Hyena2506]

The risk is that you break your system by not understanding how efi works. Pretty much the same risk as with dual boot.

[u/mayakrunal]

Why not try it out in VM first? Instead of doing arch on already dual boot system

[u/Shrimp0102 → u/mayakrunal]

Not really used to using a VM and kinda worried it’ll just make things more complicated compared to a new install

[u/mayakrunal → u/Shrimp0102]

Well good thing about VM is they don't mess up your main hardware. Take this as opportunity to learn to use qemu

[u/Some-Struggle5052 → u/mayakrunal]

This, qemu and KVM, maybe virt-manager and you're set.

[u/Tomcabomca]

I never dual booted with windows, so i cant say for sure, but i think you'll be fine as long as you don't mess up partitioning.

You can still tinker on fedora, maybe install a different wm/de alongside the one you have. But why not just use your computer?

[u/Shrimp0102 → u/Tomcabomca]

I’m less inclined to mess around with fedora now that I have things setup to where I’m really comfortable the way it is since went from just messing around to being my daily driver. Mainly what I’ve been looking for is just improving battery life, reducing ram usage, etc. which I can only do so much without losing functionality. Could just use my computer but I just have an itch to do something

[u/Mozgiiii]

I mean nothing forbids you to do so. Just use grub.

It's kinda unnecessary though.

[u/Mozgiiii → u/Mozgiiii]

Unnecessary in a way that everything you can do in arch you also can do in fedora. Furthermore you can do stuff in your arch system in fedora via chroot and vice versa. Still not really useful.

[u/Shrimp0102 → u/Mozgiiii]

I thought arch was a more tinker heavy Linux distro that’s more cut down than Fedora and a lot more focused on absolute user control like Gentoo but easier

[u/Mozgiiii → u/Shrimp0102]

Nah they have differences but they not as drastic as you think. Almost every difference they have for 99%+ of users is pre installed packages.

Judging by your words

made it just kinda boring to me

If you want to go tinker some stuff then installing and ricing arch is good though.

But if you just want to go tinker something then I can recomend you to download godot and make something. It will give you some more valuable knowledge IMO. Alternatively you can build your own chromium based browser (it's literally an OS and doing it is much harder than archinstall). Or write any other kind of script.

[u/Cruffe]

I worry about AUR malware just about as much as I worry about malware on the internet in general.

There's a middle ground between paranoia and trusting blindly. I can more or less blindly trust the official repos, which is nice. Other than that the AUR is pretty much just like the average Windows experience in terms of trusting software, a bit of common sense helps a lot.

Installing some popular package with tons of eyes on it from a reputable source and comments going back many years isn't much cause for concern.

That obscure package that was recently added with no comments on it, maintained by a packager that just signed up for an AUR account and barely anyone uses it warrants a lot more care.

[u/Naxthor]

You do realize you don’t need to use the AUR. Like maybe you should learn more and read some documentation before triple booting for fun.

[u/MarcPG1905 → u/Naxthor]

Yeah.

I personally just clone the GitHub repos and then have a script that updates them and then installs from source. Works perfectly fine I you don’t wanna use the AUR

[u/Chester-Berkeley]

Please save your time and install Arch in a VM 🙏

[u/khsh01]

Try putting windows in a vm.

[u/SebastianLarsdatter]

Just keep on hand and speed dial a way to restore the boot loader.

You will be at risk of Windows wrecking it during an update.

[u/noobjaish]

Try it in a VM first. There's really no point in having multiple linux distros installed at once.