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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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

  • @d_k_bo@feddit.de
    2•1 year ago

    HDD, which is /home

    Spinning rust is slow

    Have you tried to either

    1. put /home on the SSD and only larger subdirectories on the HDD
    2. 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.

    • S410
      1•1 year 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.