this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
55 points (96.6% liked)

Linux

53490 readers
1075 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

Related Communities

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

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How did you partition your disk before installing Linux? Do you regret how you set it up?

I'm looking for some real users experiences about this and I'm trying to find the best approach for my setup.

Thank you for sharing!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Are you going to dual boot? Do you have some other special requirement? If not, there's no reason to overthink partitioning in my opinion. I did this for my main NVME:

  • Partition table: GPT
  • /boot : 1GB fat32 partition. Depending on your needs (number of kernels, initramfs's, other OSs) you might be fine with 500MB or even less. But because resizing can be a pain and I have the space to spare, I would much rather overprovision.
  • / : LUKS2 partition containing a btrfs filesystem with all the remaining space

I use a swap file so I don't use a swap partition. If you want more control over specific parts of the filesystem, eg a separate /home that you can snapshot or keep when reinstalling the system, then use btrfs subvolumes. This gives you a lot of the features a partition would give you without committing to a specific size.

This is the only partitioning scheme I have never regretted. When I've tried to do separate partitions I find myself always regretting the sizes I've allocated. On the other hand, I have not actually seen any benefit of the separation in practice.