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Ok, wait...I thought a partition meant that it was in effect a wall between different OSs if you had multiples on one computer, not like separate folders like in Windows Explorer (which is what I'm getting from this comment, if I'm wrong please let me know).
A partition is a dedicated space on a disk. In windows there's not much use to partition a disk, but it can be done, and you would have a C: and D: drives with only one physical disk. I used to do that back in the day to have a partition for backups.
If you only have one disk and want to have multiple OS, you need to partition the disk, so that each OS can write their data without interfering with one another. Essentially what you're doing is, like you said, putting a wall between areas in the disk, but you can do that regardless of having different OS in each side.
In Linux things are a bit different, the representation of your disks is a file inside
/dev, for example the first disk (non-nvme) Linux finds will be/dev/sda, the next one will be/dev/sdbso on and so forth, but since disks can be partitioned the first partition in your first disk is/dev/sda1, then/dev/sda2, etc. Then there's a file called/etc/fstabthat has lines like/dev/sdb3 /home, this means that the 3d partition in the second disk will be accessible in the folder/home. You don't really need to worry about this file in general, during the installation there will be a nice GUI to let you say which partition goes where.How is that useful? Well, if you have the system in
/dev/sda2and your/homefolder in/dev/sda3you can format/dev/sda2and reinstall the system or change the distro entirely without losing your data stored in/home.PS: I'm simplifying some stuff, but for reference :
/dev/hda1, this is because the s in sda refers to SATA, which essentially all disks are nowadays/dev/nvme0n1/etc/fstabhas other parameters to tell it certain flags like mount read-only. Also it rarely used/dev/sda1style naming because that might change if you swap the cables in your computer, instead it uses a unique identifier that's points to the correct partition regardless of order.but all that's besides the point.