Triple-Boot+ Hopping Operating Systems On Its Own

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

So, multi-booting has been a thing for a while now, if not a long time. This came to mind earlier, within the last couple of days. I am wondering if it’s ever been done to get a PC to hop operating systems on its own, according to a series of programs. For example, booting up into each operating system, then hopping from Mac, to Windows, to Linux. Or vice versa, in whichever particular order.

2

You mean booting all three operating systems at once and having a shared folder you launch programs from and it goes directly to the operating system that supports the program you launched?

3

No I literally mean hopping operating systems. Booting into one, then booting into another, etc…

4

The magic of Virtualization is your friend

5

I dual boot two copies of windows, and have shortcuts on my desktop to select which system to boot into. Automating that is a pretty small step from there, though I’m struggling to think of why you would need to do that.

OS roulette? The ultimate distro hopper experience.

6

I have penta-boot on 3 of my computers - Win11 and 4 linux distros! Main headache is remembering to regularly boot into each install to update them once in a while.

I mostly run ubuntu-based distros (KDE neon, elementary OS) and openSUSE Tumbleweed, debian13 on my newest 9950X box.

Side note - to help speed up software updates/installs I’ve setup local mirrors on my NUC of the ubuntu/tumbleweed/distro archives, except for debian which gets excellent speeds with their local mirror.

1 Like
7

Has been a thing for a while. Install each operating system on a different drive and consolidate the entries into one bootloader.

You said:

Which means, to me, that you would switch operating system every time you need a program that doesn’t run on a given OS.
Unless you keep rebootig your PC over and over and over you need to virtually boot all of them at once for a more seamless experience.

8

Hmm, OP wants an automatic process I guess so that everything does itself… If I understand correctly, the first OS should start, reboot and the second OS, reboot and the third OS, reboot and the first OS…?

Or do you want to turn on the PC and see three OSs started? I guess that only virtualization remains. Where is the host on the bare metal as start three virtual machines… just don’t tell me that they also have to share hardware and resources at the same time?