Thanks for the suggestion, so far I have not liked the "window in a window" aspect of a VM, but instead prefer the "bare metal" install, each distro has its own / partition, and some of them share the partition for the /home.
Your first answer says you do not share the /home partition but this answer says Yes.
The /home is a "directory" right?? One can have numerous "directories" "sharing the partition" without any issues of corruption or interminglingness . . . . And, if there is an issue with /, as I recently had with my Sid install, it is easy and clean to install a new / while maintaining the same name for the /home directory.
You do NOT have to run the VMs in a Window, you can run them full screen with VMWare and there is NO indication you are not running on bare metal unless you drop down the VM menu in the middle of the screen. KVM/QEMU can also go full screen too.
OK, good to know, but to me "full screen" is still "a window" it is now just "filling the, um, "window"??
Just my $0.02 but I do most of the same stuff you are doing but without the headaches :-)
VirtualBox can as well.
Larry
Cool. I do have a VB installed somewhere, just haven't used it in some years.