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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.

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Just moved to Linux: a follow up (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it's been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol.
Fortunately I kept my /home on its own partition, so this shouldn't be too bad to get back up and running as desired.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Keeping /home separate is a good call. I can also recommend backups to a different system. Also test those backups.

Playing with things can be fun if that is what you enjoy. Being careful is good but the best way to avoid serious issues is being able to recover from the worst case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Why do you advocate for keeping /home separate?

I personally don't do it because the more partitions you have, the more often you need to fiddle around in GParted when one partition gets full. This is also why I use swap files instead of swap partitions

As far as I can tell, unless you distro-hop, separating /home doesn't have any advantages. Even then, sharing one /home directory between multiple desktop environments can cause some problems

I agree with making and testing backups, though. My current strategy is to back everything up to a 4.2 TiB ZFS pool with daily snapshots on my LAN, and back up the most important data on that to the cloud

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I don't think it is critical to keep /home separate but if you need to reinstall it is really nice. You can reset the OS without touching your data or user-level configs. Either for the same distro because you fiddled around and broke it or another one for distro-hopping. It also makes encrypting it easy, although full-disk encryption is getting so easy that it probably isn't an issue. Good backups also mitigate this, although the recovery will be slower than just reinstalling while leaving your existing home there.

To be honest I don't actually keep home separate anymore. But that is mostly because I trust NixOS enough that I know I will never need to reinstall. I can always roll back or worst case install over top of the existing install from a live USB.

Overall I would say that the cost of doing so is fairly small as well. Unless you are running a lot of system services data outside of /home is usually fairly limited. Although I agree that getting the partition sizes wrong can be frustrating.