How to multiboot different linux distros?

I have come up with a project for myself that will solve my current dilemma of not knowing which distro to use to actually learn linux. Multiboot several distros and try each on my own time, and discover either hate or love per distro, and make a final verdict on which one to keep, or keep several... who knows?

The only distro I used for more than a couple weeks was crunchbang, but that was on a crappy laptop I brought to local coding group meetings.

My project:

Install several linux distros on the same hard drive that share a home partition (Someone mentioned in one of my last posts that you can do this).

The Distros I would like to try:

-Arch

-openSUSE

-CentOS

-Ubuntu + UbuntuGNOME + UbuntuMATE (the best implementation of MATE I have experienced)

-Fedora

-Debian (Just tried debian and did not really enjoy it because the installer didnt connect to the internet so I got stuck with a minimal install, and I dont know what to install to get a system to my liking yet)

 

My favorite desktop environment is actually vanilla Gnome 3.14, or whatever the latest version is. I dont mind the small loss in functionality over MATE, if any. I like pretty interfaces, what can I say. It reminds me that I am using a modern OS, I do enjoy myself a good command line though, even if I am not that experienced in it.

 

Sorry I ramble a lot...

Is this project as simple as doing a manual partition in the setup of each OS and making the pre-existing home partition the home partition for each install? 

Yeah, basically. But why not just learn to use VM's on a distro you know?  I did the same thing for a while with 3 different distro's on a netbook but I learned VM's are way easier to test drive(though I'm not sure they would be on that netbook). But if you're going to install multiple os, only install GRUB once. The installers are going to complain about not having a bootloader but ignore it. As you install more, boot into your original distro, update grub and your distro's will show up on next reboot.  

^ Exactly. Just try them out in a VM first. No need to go through all the trouble and storage space just to try out a distro. Only install it when you know you like it. +1 For the GRUB comment too.

That's what I did, I used vm on my windows computer. Also try out mints its nice. 

Or just set up a Chroot or LXC container and have them share the same kernel and everything else just use the most up to date  kernel on your host system.

You can do what you are asking you will have to make sure grub can see the other distros and if it can't you will just have to add the entries manually in the config file. Or have a separate /boot partition all the distros use. So you may want to share both /home and /boot.

If you have more than one boot loader you could just press esc and it will cycle to the next boot loader.

Isn't Linux fun you have so many options?

Thank you guys for your help!

I do know how to use vm's already, but my thinking behind doing it like this was I get the experience of it being on my hardware, instead of emulated hardware. I have had several problems in the past with graphics drivers, network drivers, kernel updates, etc, that just didn't show up when I used vm's.

Sorry if I am wrong, but from viewing other threads, I think I read somewhere that your favorite distro is openSUSE. I was wondering if you could tell me why. What makes it better for you than the others? What work do you do in openSUSE?

I like OpenSuse because of YaST. YaST is a GUI for many command line tools, kinda like the Windows control panel. 

OpenOpenSuse is very stable on point releases and have a rolling release mode as well. 

The built in VM tools it has are some of the best I hav eseen.

Opensuse's default file system is BTRFS which most other distros will adapt soon but it has tools out of the box for it like snapper (snapshoting).

If it doesn't come with the desktop interface you like look in Suse studio there will be a spin for it.

The wiki and documentation is one of the best only superseded by Arch.

Zypper, SUSE's package manager works very similar to apt so it isn't hard to learn.

UEFI works with no hassle.

In general it is very nice multi purpose distro.