How did you partition your disk before installing Linux? Do you regret how you set it up?
I’m looking for some real users experiences about this and I’m trying to find the best approach for my setup.
Thank you for sharing!
In 20 years of using Linux my partition scheme has always been to say yes to whatever the OS suggests.
It’s usually that way for a reason, is my thinking
whatever the OS suggests.
Ew. Then you get XFS.
Defaults are usually fine for most users. People who know they are going to distro hop or need to move data later should have a separate
/home, but that’s about it until you get into special purpose installs.- 550MiB /boot (also used as esp)
- Rest for / (btrfs)
- Subvols for /home, /var/log, /var/cache, /.snapshots (snapper snaps), /swap
For Laptops:
- 500 MB - /boot/efi
- 1 GB /boot ext2
- X GB for / with Luks2 encrypted f2fs
And don’t forget: GPT not MBR.
Two separate EFI boot Partitions if you dual boot. Its not worth letting Windows know about linux. Linux chainloads to Windows boot.
I tend to just take the defaults when I’m deploying. I wouldn’t get any benefit of having home or tmp on a separate partition, but it’s nice that it’s an option.
- 180 MB
/efi(if needed) - 384 MB
/boot(for LUKS compatibility) - Remainder
/(usually btrfs)
- 180 MB
In my first install I had different home and root partitions. That was a big mistake. Once set, you cannot resize them properly and you are fucked if they are not perfect for your need. In my case the root partition got to small. After some time I just reinstalled with a single partition and would do that again.
Once set, you cannot resize them properly
This is untrue.
I’ve resized and moved partitions on a remote host during a reboot – i.e. doing the change in a batch during that boot.
It’s possible, and for most other resizes it’s easy enough and worth it for the benefits. Do you want to do it daily? No. Do you want to half-ass it and not pay attention during? Also no.
I partitioned my disk 50/50 for Windows and Linux with some proprietary software. It didn’t end up working and i whiped my windows install.
Then I bought a new boot drive so my linux and macos install are physically separated.
I just use the automatic thingy on my distro so like:
- Esp: 2GB (Limine + btrfs snapshot booting)
- root: all the drive
For my desktop, I have two disks. One is root, one is home. They are single BTRFS filesystems with automated snapshots, compressions, and a few subvolumes. Works great.
For a laptop, similar but with only a single disk/partition and FDE. Also works well.
save 80gb for root, sone swap (if not on an ssd) rest for /home. that way reinstalling or switching has minimal risk of losing my /home
/boot/efi /root
2-4G for swap (more if you want to hibernate), the rest for /. Only add a boot/EFI partition if needed.
Over-partitioning is a newbie mistake IMO, it usually causes way more problems than it solves.
with the majority here, I just use distro default / automatic setup in installer
LONG ago, I did the whole hand-crafted thing, obsessing over exactly how large each partition had to be, but with increasing speed and lowering prices of storage, this attention to detail now seems pretty irrelevant:
hdasplit into/boot,/tmp,(swap),/,/,/usr,/varhdbsplit into(swap)and/home
