Linux

48743 readers

858 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How to distrohop!? (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I'm content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] nous 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Huh? You seem to be arguing both ways? If the system drive is full you have problems well before you risk losing data and if the home drive is full you have problems saving data? Both of these things can happen in a split partition or single partition setup. The split partition just means you have to get the space correct or end up with long resizing options for juggling the size around. And with a single partition it gives you more places to free up space when you do run out.

Need to save a file but the disk is full? Clean out the package manager cache. You cannot do that if the partitions are separate. An update does not have enough space? Delete a steam game or clear out your downloads folder.

Ext also has a reserved space option which when there is less free space than that option it refuses writes to anything but the root user - which is meant to solve the issue of a user trying to use up to much space, there is always a reserved bit that the system can do what it needs to. Though I have never seen this configured correctly for a running system and root can blast past the default 5% on smaller drives with a simple update. Or some other process is running as root is already consuming that space.

Other partition types like btrfs have proper quotas that can be set per directory or user to prevent this type of issue as well and gives you a lot more control over the allocated space without needing to reboot into a live USB to resize the partitions.

People seem to think a split partition helps but I have generally found it just causes more problems then it solves and there are now better tools that actually solve these problems in more elegant ways.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Sorry for the confusion there, trying to be too concise in a short reply.

I get the points you're making; I've been there, done the root space recovery thing (the default can be a massive amount of space with modern drives, so I've changed it on several systems). I've setup lvm across drives, used btrfs (& sunvolumes), etc, so I know where you're coming from. Never seen quotas actually used out in the wild of (generally) single user domestic settings.

But, moving /home to a separate partition, drive(s), etc. provides flexibility - in this case, the OP's point of distrohopping.