this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Since I'm a new moderator here I figured I should actually install Debian, but I decided to do it with a twist.

I got the idea from here: https://codeberg.org/Calamares/calamares/issues/1580

It's actually not too hard to install multiple Linux distros sharing the same Btrfs partition, which means you don't have to preallocate space.

Default Calamares mount.conf here https://codeberg.org/Calamares/calamares/src/branch/calamares/src/modules/mount/mount.conf#L50-L57

My 40_custom file:

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
menuentry "Kubuntu" --class kubuntu --class ubuntu --class os {
 insmod part_gpt
 insmod btrfs
 search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root c9710fb0-4ebb-4335-a58a-4176d894dcf9
 linux /@/boot/vmlinuz root=UUID=c9710fb0-4ebb-4335-a58a-4176d894dcf9 ro rootflags=subvol=@ quiet splash
 initrd /@/boot/initrd.img
}

I was disappointed that os-prober didn't work.

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[–] cheeseburger@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

This is neat, thanks for posting. I was playing with btrbk a few weeks ago to take advantage of btrfs and set up incremental backups for my laptop to a storage server. The storage server only has xfs, but you can build btrfs subvolumes on top by creating a loop device with a few commands, no preallocated space required.

Anyway it was pretty satisfying to get going and has made me want to have more Fun with Subvolumes! Installing distros on subvolumes sounds like a good time to me!