this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Linux

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One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table? (self.linux)
submitted 1 year ago by mambabasa to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

  • FAT32: EFI
  • BTRFS: /
  • Swap: Swap
  • Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

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[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Managing all that seems like a lot of effort, and given my disk issues havent yet been fatal, ill probably not worry about going that far. Thanks for the info though.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No effort at al. You define them once at install time and that's it.

For added flexibility you can use LVM volumes instead of partitions, they make resizing operations a thing of joy.

BTRFS also has something like subvols baked in, but I haven't looked into it.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Getting the size wrong and needing to resize is the effort part for me. Resizing/moving my partitions is always a pain.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once you learn about LVM, you'll never use a naked partition again. Or your money back.

[–] idiocy@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for your consultation about lvm.

I'll take a look.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Last time i used LVM was way back in fedora 8 days, when it was the default partition. It was super annoying to use, as gparted didnt support it, and live cds often had trouble with it. Having to read doco to resize it was pretty not good for a newbie to linux. Has it improved since?

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LVM does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you're over it, you realise how dumb it is to keep partitioning disks like it's 1995.

Most if not all graphical disk managers now work with LVM.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Thats good to know, thank you for that info, I might look into it next time i have to reinstall.