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submitted 11 months ago by mambabasa@slrpnk.net to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

  • FAT32: EFI
  • BTRFS: /
  • Swap: Swap
  • Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

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[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

It depends, if your docker installation uses /var, it will surelly help to keep it separated.

For my home systems, I have: UEFI, /boot, /, home, swap.

For my work systems, we additionally have separate /opt, /var, /tmp and /usr.

/usr will only grow when you add more software to your system. /var and /tmp are where applications and services store temporary files, log files and caches, so they can vary wildly depending on what is running. /opt is for third-party stuff, so it depends if you use it or not.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago

Managing all that seems like a lot of effort, and given my disk issues havent yet been fatal, ill probably not worry about going that far. Thanks for the info though.

[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

No effort at al. You define them once at install time and that's it.

For added flexibility you can use LVM volumes instead of partitions, they make resizing operations a thing of joy.

BTRFS also has something like subvols baked in, but I haven't looked into it.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 5 points 11 months ago

Getting the size wrong and needing to resize is the effort part for me. Resizing/moving my partitions is always a pain.

[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Once you learn about LVM, you'll never use a naked partition again. Or your money back.

[-] idiocy@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago

Thanks for your consultation about lvm.

I'll take a look.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

Last time i used LVM was way back in fedora 8 days, when it was the default partition. It was super annoying to use, as gparted didnt support it, and live cds often had trouble with it. Having to read doco to resize it was pretty not good for a newbie to linux. Has it improved since?

[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

LVM does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you're over it, you realise how dumb it is to keep partitioning disks like it's 1995.

Most if not all graphical disk managers now work with LVM.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

Thats good to know, thank you for that info, I might look into it next time i have to reinstall.

this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
92 points (96.0% liked)

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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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