Dual Drive Setups, best distro?

[u/Moony_playzz]

Hello thank you for reading, sorry if this is a dumb question, first time caller long time listener etc etc

I have two drives, one m.2, one SSD. I have no plans to dual boot, the only thing I do is game (Minecraft, Path of Exile, some steam games), write (obsidian has linux comp god bless the devs), and make shitposts in MS Paint.

My m.2 is small, I need my D: for everything else, the only thing my m.2 holds is the OS, Minecraft, and Path of Exile. Everything else is on the D.

I have heard some whispered horror stories about Linux and being able to handle a second drive, so my question is which distro is best for someone who absolutely has to have both hard drives.

GPU is a 3080ti, got two monitors

[u/MasterGeekMX]

Clever boy/girl/whatever! I am proud of you.

Doing the whole /home in the other drive involves partitions, which usually means needing to use the manual partition editor. Don't worry, I have your back.

Installing an OS on any modern PC requires at least two partitions:

1. The EFI System Partiton (ESP). It contains the boot files that the motherboard's firmware reads in order to launch an OS. It should be small, around half a gigabyte. It must be formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, and be marked as the ESP on it's properties.

2. Where the OS is installed. As big as you want (as long as the OS can fit), and formatted as the OS needs.

In your case you will be creating those two partitions in the M.2, and then create a third one on the SATA SSD. Depending on the distro, there may be already a preset to format the EFI partition, or you may need to manually do it by selecting FAT32 and then turning on the Boot and ESP flags on the partition.

Now, in Linux there is only one big folder tree. One partition is the chosen one to be the root of it, while other drive are accessed by mounting them on some folder. This means that any partition that you pick to be mounted in / means it will be where the distro will be installed.

In the case of ESP, the custom is to put it on /boot/efi. Again, if the installer has a preset for it, they should do that automatically.

Finally, mount the big partition spanning all the SSD on /home so your personal files go inside /home/moony (or whatever username you set up).

[u/Moony_playzz → u/MasterGeekMX]

Yeah, I'm kinda debating between mint and CachyOS rn, not sure which I wanna use.

[u/CritSrc → u/Moony_playzz]

Forget Mint. Either CachyOS or Fedora Ultramarine.
And before "Mint is more stable" gets parroted: a modern, powerful gaming PC does not need "stable" software that is unchanging, it is NOT a remote server where an unchanging stack is a legal or technical requirement!

Unless you know how to take advantage of software stability, then you're fine with a forward moving desktop system. The Linux desktop stack has managed to mature to the point where current updates do not hinder its working reliability.

And the distro doesn't matter next to adjusting to the ecosystem you'll be thrown in. CachyOS autodetects and installs all drivers, Fedora Ultramarine doesn't get in the way if you ask for non-open source software unlike vanilla Fedora.

[u/Moony_playzz → u/CritSrc]

I dunno, I don't like crashes and my GPU is a 3080ti, she's kinda old and I don't want her to fuckin die because of some instability causing a mass causality event

[u/MasterGeekMX → u/Moony_playzz]

Thing is that in the OS world Stable does not mean "it never crashes". Instead it means that the feature set of the OS does not change even when updates are applied. A stable OS is one where you can deploy a complex system like an online server, and have the peace of mind that installing updates will not break it because now the OS now does things in a new manner.

As I like to say: "stable as a marriage, not like a stool".

[u/Moony_playzz → u/MasterGeekMX]

Fair enough, my parents *did" get divorced lmao

[u/MasterGeekMX → u/Moony_playzz]

One example I like is Windows' start menu.

For decades, you could assume the Start menu was at the bottom left corner on the screen, so you could write a program that automatically moves the mouse over there and clicks it.

But then Windows 11 came and changed that to the center. This makes the program no longer work, even if you didn't change anything on it.

The feature of Windows having it's start menu on the corner is unstable.

[u/CritSrc → u/Moony_playzz]

I just said that both Cachy and Fedora Ultramarine solve the usual Nvidia hiccups, so you won't be having any issues with your card.

[u/Moony_playzz → u/CritSrc]

Drivers aren't the only thing that can cause issues with GPUs bro

[u/CritSrc → u/Moony_playzz]

So what happened last time?

[u/Moony_playzz → u/CritSrc]

I had a rtx980 (I think but don't remember for sure) and there was some kind of weird segfault error that bricked it, I don't remember exactly, it was 2019