this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 10 months ago by mambabasa@slrpnk.net to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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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[–] Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why do you have a btrfs volume and an ext4 volume? I went btrfs and used sub volumes to split up my root and home but I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do it or not

[–] S410@kbin.social 6 points 10 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.

[–] d_k_bo@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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@kbin.social 1 points 10 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.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I use btrfs for my / because I can use Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool to make snapshots, but I don’t want snapshots of /home to be included. Am I doing this wrong?

[–] S410@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How about when I reinstall the OS? Will it only affect the / and not touch the /home?

[–] S410@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

As long as you don't re-format the partition. Not all installers are created equal, so it might be more complicated to re-install the OS without wiping the partition entirely. Or it might be just fine. I don't really install linux often enough to know that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not sure if that’s wrong or not tbh, I use snapper instead of timeshift and I wanted /home included in the snapshots anyway (I think it let me set them up as 2 separate jobs). The reason I went with subvolumes instead of separate partitions is that I didn’t have to worry about sizing. I also know I can reinstall to my root subvolume without affecting the others, depending on the installer for your distro I don’t know how easy that is vs just having separate partitions. I played around with it in a VM for a while to see what the backup and restore process is like before I actually committed to anything!

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 3 points 10 months ago

Alright, thanks, I’ll try some experiments the next time I have the opportunity to do so.