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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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.

  • Atemu@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    What you’re doing is perfectly fine.

    It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.

    If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.

  • taanegl@beehaw.org
    11·
    10 months ago

    Well technically, if you’re using BTRFS, you might want to check out subvolumes. Here’s my subvolume setup:

    • Subvolume 1, named @ (root subvol)
    • Subvolume 2, named @home (/home subvol)
    • Subvolume 3, named @srv (/srv subvol)
    • Subvolume 4, named @opt (/opt subvol)
    • Subvolume 5, named @swap (which is - you guessed it - the swap subvol)

    You then set up fstab to reflect each of the subvolumes, using the subvol= option. Here’s the kicker: they are all in one partition. Yes, even the swap. Though caveat, swap still has to be a swapfile, but in its own separate subvolume. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the way to do it.

    The great thing about subvolumes is that it doesn’t do any size provisioning, unless specified by the user. All subvolumes share the space available within the partition. This means you won’t have to do any soul searching when setting up the partitions regarding use of space.

    This also means that if I want to nuke and pave, I only need run a BTRFS command on my @ subvolume (which contains /usr, /share, /bin), because it won’t be touching the contents of @home, @srv, or @opt. What’s extra cool here is that I’ll lose 0% FS metadata or permission setup, since you’re technically just disassociating some blocks from a subvolume. You’re not really “formatting”… which is neat as hell.

    The only extra partitions I have is the EFI partition and an EXT4 partition for the /boot folder since I use LUKS2.

    • KiranWells@pawb.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      Have you had any luck with hibernation with a BTRFS swapfile? My computer still does not start from hibernation, and I am not sure why, even though I followed the Arch wiki to set it up.

      • taanegl@beehaw.org
        01·
        10 months ago

        Can’t say I have. Haven’t used hibernation mode for years even. Sleep mode is just too good nowadays for me to use it, so I guess we could chalk that up to a fault of the setup.

        According to ReadTheDocs (BTRFS, swapfile) it’s possible under certain circumstances, but requires the 6.1 kernel to do it in a relatively easy way.

  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    0·
    10 months ago

    All fine though I would recommend you look into lvm, gives you easier control over sizing and resizing, even online.

    • msage@programming.dev
      0·
      10 months ago

      Isn’t it better to use btrfs nowadays?

      I’m also old-school lvm person, but I put btrfs in my Gentoo desktop, though I don’t actually utilize it at all.

      • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
        1·
        10 months ago

        Yes and no

        Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.

        Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them