[Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.

[w***@gmail.com]

Hello,

I'd like to hear your thought whether or not partitioning is necessary for
your average internet dwelling hooman. I have a 500GB HD, 4GB of RAM. How
many partitions would I need. Should I just have 1 for root, 1 for /home.
Using MBR that would ofc be 2 primary partitions, right?

[e***@riseup.net]

The average user only needs one partition to avoid the root partition
overfilling. But if you are in the habit of reinstalling and want to keep old
data, a separate home partition would be nice to have. MBR choice depends on
your hardware and firmware. BIOS boot expects MBR, UEFI can use GUID GPT. Use
MBR if you have a disk 2 TB or less. MBR supports four primary partitions.

I use two partitions, root and home, no swap.

[x***@live.cn]

Here's my partitioning schemes:

MBR partition table, BIOS/Legacy boot firmware:
/, /boot, /home, swap

GPT partition table, BIOS/Legacy boot firmeare:
bios boot, /, /boot, /home, swap

GPT partition table, UEFI boot firmware:
/boot/efi, /, /boot, /home, swap

So 4 or 5 partitions are more than enough for "average users".

[i***@protonmail.com]

With 4GB of RAM I'd suggest having a swap partition. Just in case, who knows
how many applications will be running at some point all at once.

So, if the computer supports using MBR, this is my suggested partition
scheme:

/ ext4 60GB
/swap 2xRAM size = 8GB
/home ext4 all the rest = about 425GB

This way you have a huge root partition, you will probably never run out of
space, even after installing every application that is remotely interesting
to you. You also have twice as much swap as RAM, so you are never likely to
run out of that too. And you still have way over 400GB for home, which is
huge imho. If you want to store lots of videos in HD, you will need an extra
drive anyway.

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

Twice the RAM for the swap is a lot. If your system swaps because it ran out
of RAM, it is unbearably slow (because the disk is about 100 times slower
than the RAM) and you will not wait for that much swap to be filled before
saving your work and closing applications. Nowadays, having as much swap as
RAM is already a lot, unless you want to hibernate (in which case, it is kind
of necessary because hibernating basically is zipping the content of the main
memory and storing it on the swap partition).

60 GB for / is a lot too. Nevertheless, that depends on what you plan to
install. In particular, some video games require a lot of disk space. For
those who do install heavy games, I would advise 32 GB to be at ease, what is
already much more than what the default install does (14 GB if I remember
well: too little in my humble opinion).

The rest of the disk for /home: for a desktop usage, I only see drawbacks in
further partitioning the disk.

[x***@live.cn]

Regarding "the rest of the disk for /home", I don't see so many drawbacks.
Most "average users" are highly unlikely to re-partition their HDD/SSD. They
tend to accept and keep whatever they are provided.

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

I apparently have not expressed myself clearly: I meant "I only see drawbacks
in having the file hierarchy on more than two partitions (/ and /home)".

I actually have /tmp on a tmpfs filesystem (i.e., in RAM) and that is useful
for my work (I often deal with large temporary files I make with 'mktmp').
Nevertheless, for a regular desktop user, the performance gain will never be
noticeable and she may run out of RAM if she does not have as much RAM as I
(16 GB) and uses, for instance, Popcorn Time, which downloads movies into
/tmp.

[w***@gmail.com]

Well thank you all for your responses. I think I'm gonna go with /root, /home
and /swap. Just because why not, right? There aren't any negatives to having
partitions (assuming that they are done correctly). I think hehe.

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

Why do you want to put root's file on a separate partition? You will
probably never have a lot in /root anyway. In fact, users of distribution
that rely on 'sudo' (including Trisquel) usually do not write anything in
/root.

The swap partition is not mounted, i.e., it is not attached to the file
hierarchy. There is no such thing as /swap unless you create it... and,
indeed, it is possible to have a swap file instead of (or in addition to) a
swap partition. However only swap *partition* allow you to hibernate the
system.

The drawback of having more partitions is that you more easily end up with a
full partition, when another partition still has a lot of space available.
You then need to repartition. And, depending on the filesystems you chose,
it may not be that easy: XFS cannot be shrunk; JFS cannot be resized at all,
etc.

[e***@riseup.net]

I think he means '/', not the superuser directory 'root'. / that we call root
has no name.

[s***@disintermedia.net.nz]

I've spent a lot of time in the past cleaning up the messes of people's
borked Windows systems. By default, Windows PCs always have the OS and user
files in the same partition, so when the OS dies, as it inevitably does, you
have to painstakingly back up all the users files onto a sufficiently large
external drive before you can do a reinstall, or install a new OS.

Learning from this experience, I always advise people to have separate
partitions for / and /home. This means you can easily reinstall your OS, or
switch to a different distro, without having to copy the entire contents of
your primary drive to another drive first and re-partition from scratch
(note: it's wise to do a fresh backup of anything mission critical before
making any such changes to do your drive). I find a 16GB partition for / is
usually enough (anything larger than 30GB is really a waste of space).

On my systems, I always have a second primary partition the same size, which
I use for testing new versions or distros that I'm thinking about using, or
just curious about. At present I have two swap partitions the same size as
RAM, one to go with each primary partition, but from now I will just use one,
for reasons Magic Banana has explained in previous thread on this topic.