Share your partition scheme!

~500 MB for /boot and the rest is LUKS-encrypted btrfs

• 550MiB /boot (also used as esp)
• Rest for / (btrfs)
• Subvols for /home, /var/log, /var/cache, /.snapshots (snapper snaps), /swap

Defaults are usually fine for most users. People who know they are going to distro hop or need to move data later should have a separate /home, but that's about it until you get into special purpose installs.

Just recently repartitioned my MacBook:

1 GB for EFI (vfat)

2 GB for /boot (ext4)

11 GB for swap

224 GB for / (bcachefs)

Grub cannot load a kernel off bcachefs so I need ext4 to bridge the gap. Once the kernel is loaded, it has no problem using bcachefs as root.

This is a laptop. On a desktop that can handle more drives, I would split /home onto a drive of its own.

I just chose the automatic partition thingy ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

For Laptops:

• 500 MB - /boot/efi
• 1 GB /boot ext2
• X GB for / with Luks2 encrypted f2fs

And don't forget: GPT not MBR.

I partitioned my disk 50/50 for Windows and Linux with some proprietary software. It didn't end up working and i whiped my windows install.

Then I bought a new boot drive so my linux and macos install are physically separated.

Two separate EFI boot Partitions if you dual boot. Its not worth letting Windows know about linux. Linux chainloads to Windows boot.

For my desktop, I have two disks. One is root, one is home. They are single BTRFS filesystems with automated snapshots, compressions, and a few subvolumes. Works great.

For a laptop, similar but with only a single disk/partition and FDE. Also works well.

/boot/efi, /root

    
EFI
83:boot(e4fs)
8e:lvm(e4fs)
bf:zfs

  

This is just for /dev/sda or so, and implies non-redundant root disks because mirroring is done by the hypervisor. I've been 20 years doing virtualization, and I'm really starting to forget the last vestiges of my mdadm fdisk layout.

So many people in this thread have no idea why you'd want separate allocation for /home and /tmp and others. Are we missing proper mentorship?

main ssd with debian stable: a single partition for the system + swap

secondary harddrive: an opensuse, a debian testing, and a freebsd partition + shared data partition

Well played NSA..! Anyway :

    
fabien@debian2080ti:~$ df -h
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/debian2080ti--vg-root   28G   25G  1.8G  94% /
/dev/mapper/debian2080ti--vg-home  439G  390G   27G  94% /home
/dev/sda3                          1.7T  1.6T   62G  97% /media/fabien/a77cf81e-fb2c-44a7-99a3-6ca9f15815091

/dev/nvme0n1p2                     456M  222M  210M  52% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1                     511M  5.9M  506M   2% /boot/efi
udev                                16G     0   16G   0% /dev
tmpfs                              3.2G  1.9M  3.2G   1% /run
tmpfs                               16G  168K   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                              5.0M   24K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                              3.2G  2.6M  3.2G   1% /run/user/1000

  

so basically NVMe for system and /home in .5T and HDD 2T for backups and rarely accessed files, ext4.

No dual boot, no Windows. No regrets.

I've been using Linux for over a quarter of a century. Initially I spent hours attempting to come up with the best partitioning scheme but these days I pick LVM and use the defaults.

If I run out of space, I add a drive (or grow the virtual one) and gow the filesystem into the extra space.

Sometimes I need temporary space and use sshfs to mount a directory from another machine.

In other words, today you have infinite options to adjust according to need, partition schemes are not nearly as important.

Even swap space can live as a file on a normal partition if required.

That said. If you have specific use cases, check what's required. Specifically because different uses need different attributes, it pays to check.

save 80gb for root, sone swap (if not on an ssd) rest for /home. that way reinstalling or switching has minimal risk of losing my /home

I have 1/3 of a 1 TB SSD for Windows, Linux and a free partition for random stuff each. With home finally on a second 2 TB SSD. This is great, so far.

I just clicked all drives in the Anaconda installer.

½TB nvme SSD for the OS and any system/user level binary

1TB sata SSD for code projects, docker, and videogames

10tb HDD for just having a massive amount of fairly stable storage space. I gotta tell you I sleep really well knowing that at 4 in the morning a compressed disk image of my work SSD is being written to the hard drive.

I have a separate boot partition so the rest can be encrypted with luks. That's all that's needed in a large majority of scenarios. Most other setups end up needing to resize something at some point which in many cases is a total pain.

On my primary PC I do have a second hard drive for documents and other long term storage files that I want to access more often than on the NAS. This way it's nearly impossible to lose those files of I reinstall something and it can act as a temporary backup storage for settings files when I do reinstall stuff rather than having a partition that wastes space or runs out of space.

• 180 MB /efi (if needed)
• 384 MB /boot (for LUKS compatibility)
• Remainder / (usually btrfs)

I setup a media PC with an SSD for boot / OS and spinning rust for the videos, music, etc.

So, I thought LVM would be a good idea... put the whole lot into a logical pool and then carve out large parts for the media which could be adjusted in the future.

No.

Resizing actually just chops up the drives even more (so, partition fragmentation)

Gparted can't see it, so adjustments are terrible CLI commands

And my favourite system backup tool (clonezilla) cant backup the OS without backing up the entire system.

I just use the automatic thingy on my distro so like:

• Esp: 2GB (Limine + btrfs snapshot booting)
• root: all the drive

I tend to just take the defaults when I'm deploying. I wouldn't get any benefit of having home or tmp on a separate partition, but it's nice that it's an option.

Default but In use fstab to keep my home folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, Video) on a separate HDD.

with the majority here, I just use distro default / automatic setup in installer

LONG ago, I did the whole hand-crafted thing, obsessing over exactly how large each partition had to be, but with increasing speed and lowering prices of storage, this attention to detail now seems pretty irrelevant:

• hda split into /boot, /tmp, (swap), /, /opt, /usr, /var
• hdb split into (swap) and /home

2-4G for swap (more if you want to hibernate), the rest for /. Only add a boot/EFI partition if needed.

Over-partitioning is a newbie mistake IMO, it usually causes way more problems than it solves.

sudo rm -rf *