Best way to do that is to begin with the partitions as the size that you want. After that, you would need to rely on where in the partition scheme your chosen partition to resize happens to be... a first partition, with others following, usually does not allow partition re-sizing, particularly larger. I think it is a design limitation of the macos extended format that used to be the standard Mac format (and is more challenging in some ways with the newer APFS format that Apple uses now, although there are other options that makes resizing less necessary for most uses.)
And, Linux + OS X really relies on how you set up the partitions with whatever bootloader you use with your Linux install.
I think what has worked for me in that past (when I tried Linux a few times, just for fun), is to make your partitions first. Leave the Mac partition alone for now. Install Linux, get that working. Then, install OS X, and set up what you need. Do a quick check to see that the Linux boots and works OK.
Keep in mind that I haven't used Linux, nor installed on anything since about 5 years ago. Just remember what worked for me. I might have been over-thinking that, but I could use both OSes, plus, I had a Windows 10 install at that time, so a 3-way split. As I recall, I was not very successful when trying to boot between all 3 OSes. I had to do a lot of tweaking. Ah, it was just a hobby for me, and nothing too critical.
My main plan these days is, as you seem to know, having multiple Mac systems on one drive. The one that I use commonly has 12 bootable Mac system installers (all different), plus 2 archive partitions, and 3 other partitions with actual full system installs, all bootable. No "foreign" stuff like Windows or Linux, all Mac. I do lots of service and system reinstalls on a wide range of Macs. Nice to have everything I typically might use during the day all on one drive. It's also not a hard drive, but a PCIe m.2 external 500GB SSD. Much smaller than drives I was typically using beyond a couple of years ago.