OT - Which Linux?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

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.

> 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.)

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.)

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.


-- 
Adam D. Ruppe
http://arsdnet.net