Feels like good practice to have /home mounted on a separate partition if you want to install a different distro or reinstall but I've never had to test the theory.

I wouldn't use multiple partitions anymore. First of all, you would have to decide how large your home and system partitions are which can be annoying later if you either want to install large programs/games on your system or, say, download large videos into your home partition. Apart from that, SSDs life span is reduced if you partition them, because the controller then can't distribute writes across the while disk, so the cells will not get worn out uniformly.

I usually make 3 partitions:

• /boot
• EFI GPT
• LVM or LUKS+LVM

With the LVM partition, you can carve that up and easily resize/reallocate space as needed. If it's the last partition on the drive you can easily increase the size of you clone to a larger drive later.

LUKS is off you also want encryption (which in my case I do, with the unlock key in the EFI or TPM).

It usually ends up looking like

• sda1: /boot
• sda2: [EFI GPT]
• sda3: [LUKS] -->LVM with rootfs, var, home, tmp volumes

I personally always have a 50GB / (root) partition and then make another partition for my /home folder. That way if something goes FUBAR, I can easily reinstall without needing to migrate my data somewhere else first.

I always make separate root and home partitions plus the EFI system partition. On a desktop, I will put home and root on separate drives.

I use btrfs for root, so it gets a bit more complicated with subvolumes since I want to exclude some stuff from snapshots.