OT - Which Linux?

[Jesse Phillips]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:09:02 -0400, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 06:26:19PM -0400, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> The most important tip, create a separate partition for /home.
> 
> I've gotta disagree with this. One reason why you might is if you want
> to do multiple distros, but normally this offers no real benefit and is
> really annoying down the line.
> 
> Even sharing with Windows, the separate partition doesn't help much. It
> is best to mount your Windows partition somewhere on Linux than try to
> share /home with it directly.

This is recommended because if you are getting to know Linux, you will be 
reinstalling and a separate partition for /home is... nice. I do not 
suggest sharing /home with Windows, and in fact believe you can't due to 
permission issues.

> 
>> Main partition, /, will not likely exceed 10GiB
> 
> That's what you think now. Then, 3 or 4 years later, you notice you were
> wrong, and stuff starts failing due to having no disk space. (I had a
> production server at work barf when its / filled up and there was no
> room for tmp files.)

I had an issue because of all the old cache files left around by 
aptitude, I've been running Linux for 4 years and 10GiB is doable for 
most things. Since he is just switching it is likely he will have to 
decide for himself in a year or two how best to setup his computer.

> Or, on the other hand, your home partition might fill up while your
> system partition has a lot of space left, and that bites you the other
> way. (This is what I had on my home computer - 10 GB free on /, but
> filled /home right up.)

He will run into this issue anyway because he has to share with Windows, 
he is not to the point where he can decide who gets what space and will 
likely not want Windows running out of space while Linux still has 50GiB 
free. (Linux lives happily in small places, Windows does not)

> These are huge annoyances that you are fairly likely to see at some
> point down the line. Somewhat easy to fix by deleting stuff, but still
> not fun to deal with it.
> 
> 
> Combined with the very small real benefit of partitioning in the first
> place, again with the exception of doing multiple distros on one box, it
> is just not generally good advice.
> 
> 
> Go with as few partitions as possible so you don't have to arbitrarily
> slice up your free space.

I'm currently working with 9 partitions on a 350GiB harddrive. It is all 
personal taste and I'm giving very reasonable numbers.