Macaroni9538

That's always a recommended brand. Never had much luck with their laptops, but had a real old Asus router that I liked.

Thanks, though it's actually that tricky? I honestly figured it would be more simple, but hey I guess not. Ehh I just don't want to get into VM quite yet; I've got alot of other learning to do first. But people dual boot windows and linux all the time with no problems, what is so different about dual booting or in my case triple booting three linux distros?

Ok cool, thanks. Does the bootloader partition get created automatically by the installer or is that something you must do manually? and should each partition for each distro have it's own swap? or just one swap to handle all three?

Yup that sounds ideal! i've had so much trouble with the ONLY ports on my laptop, being two usb-c ports smh. Just over the years of wear and tear they both became loose and stopped working. Had a shop replace one and he salvaged the other with adding a bit more solder. I just want to get devices away from these dog gone ports and onto a dock lol

Oh I also got a Belkin RT3200 router because I read it is the best budget router for OpenWRT, but I realized I am way in over my head with OpenWRT lol so I've backed off from that project for now. I shall get to it someday though

Yea I've read Caldigit is the gold standard for docking stations; a bit pricy for me ATM though. I think I shall get a dell dock, which should work good with my dell laptop :) What about cables and adapters and chargers? have any specific favorites for those types of things?

That's an interesting approach, but I don't think I really have any equipment that would need an actual power brick lol who knows? I only have a laptop, cell phone, printer, and a few streaming devices on my network. None are very power intensive really. Unless Im totally misunderstanding your approach?

Gotcha. Never explored Gnome boxes yet; probably just waiting for the right time. I've been trying to learn a whole lot of other tech stuff, so I sorta put virtualization on the back burner for now. Definitely wanna learn about KVM, lxd and lxc and even gnome boxes. just not right now

Perfect! Thanks for this info. Sounds much easier. Is there one particular bootloader you think would be BEST for multibooting different distro types? My guess would be a Debian system first probably? and do you recommend I make separate partitions for everything or just install the other distros into the same partition as the first install?

ummmm I dont really think I can give a good reason lol, just the way I want to do it. I feel if they're physically installed on my system, it would sort of force me to use other options, thus furthering my learning. I feel VMs or more impersonal and temporary. I use Ventoy for live OSs just to get a feel for things, but when it actually comes to daily use, I'd rather have them installed.

Dude please excuse my ignorance, but I would obviously need to make a bootloader partition, but do I have to like download grub software and install it on that partition or is that something the system will do during the partitioning process itself?

I have a Dell laptop, so maybe I should stick with dell devices if I add anything more. Currently searching for a docking station, so Dell is probably my top choice.... Not what about all the cabling?! lol