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!

  • @patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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    219 hours ago

    Are you going to dual boot? Do you have some other special requirement? If not, there’s no reason to overthink partitioning in my opinion. I did this for my main NVME:

    • Partition table: GPT
    • /boot : 1GB fat32 partition. Depending on your needs (number of kernels, initramfs’s, other OSs) you might be fine with 500MB or even less. But because resizing can be a pain and I have the space to spare, I would much rather overprovision.
    • / : LUKS2 partition containing a btrfs filesystem with all the remaining space

    I use a swap file so I don’t use a swap partition. If you want more control over specific parts of the filesystem, eg a separate /home that you can snapshot or keep when reinstalling the system, then use btrfs subvolumes. This gives you a lot of the features a partition would give you without committing to a specific size.

    This is the only partitioning scheme I have never regretted. When I’ve tried to do separate partitions I find myself always regretting the sizes I’ve allocated. On the other hand, I have not actually seen any benefit of the separation in practice.

    • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      119 hours ago

      not actually seen any benefit of the separation in practice.

      The first time some big download hoses your root, you will be enlightened :-D

      • @patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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        116 hours ago

        Right, so this is exactly the sort of “benefit” I never expect to see. This is not something that has happened to me in ~25 years of computer use, and if it does happen there are better ways to deal with it. Btrfs and zfs have quotas for this, but even if they didn’t it would not be worth the tradeoff for me. Mispredicting the partition sizes I’ll end up needing after years of use is both more likely to happen and more tedious to fix.