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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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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One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not OP, but I have the same setup.

I have BTRFS on /, which lives on an SSD and ext4 on an HDD, which is /home. BTRFS can do snapshots, which is very useful in case an update (or my own stupidity) bricks the systems. Meanwhile, /home is filled with junk like cache files, games, etc. which doesn't really make sense to snapshot, but that's, actually, secondary. Spinning rust is slow and BTRFS makes it even worse (at least on my hardware) which, in itself, is enough to avoid using it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

HDD, which is /home

Spinning rust is slow

Have you tried to either

put /home on the SSD and only larger subdirectories on the HDD
set eg. XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME etc. to a location on the SSD (to improve program startup time)

I have no direct comparison, but I can imagine that this could reduce the performance impact of your HDD.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I have a 120 gig SSD. The system takes up around 60 gigs + BTRFS snapshots and its overhead. A have around 15 gigs of wiggle room, on average. Trying to squeeze some /home stuff in there doesn't really seem that reasonable, to be honest.