Dual booting without rebooting
Suppose you have two Linux distributions installed in a dual boot situation.
One issue that can happen is when you need to frequently switch. Rebooting is disruptive if you have a bunch of things going on. You also can't copy/paste or move things between them in a second. Yes, you can mount the other distro's drive and access its files through a terminal, but that is not as convenient as running its programs.
Is there a way to run your one of your dual-booted distros from "inside" the other, without having to reboot?
The closest thing I know is to do a chroot into the other distro, for example. However, this has some issues: GUI programs are tricky and I'm not sure if the chroot is safe for everyday use.
I'm not asking for VMs. Part of the goal here is to explore how each distro interacts with my hardware. VMs hide that by creating generic virtual devices.
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I don't see any way to implement this.
XenDesktop would have been the closest thing I can think of, but it's been discontinued years ago, and it involved VMs, which you don't want. It mapped hardware directly through though and allowed to use single applications from VM A directly inside VM B, which made it pretty interesting.
I remember seeing machines which basically were two computers in the same case, but that were servers and it was for implementing redundancy. Not really an option for end users either.
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Wild idea (NOT TESTED):
This would not be for booting a whole second kernel, so it might fail badly if the distros were on wildly different kernel levels. For a graphical environment for X11, try Xephyr which makes a second, inner X server display. In the host graphical environment, you would install and run xephyr, and learn its display ID, for example, :1.
In a terminal still in the host, chroot to the root partition of the guest, then set the display environment variable, and then switch to the correct user and try running graphical programs. For a desktop environment like Xfce4 those start with something like xfce4-session.
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