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
91 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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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[–] Floey@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just use /

I don't think having a swap partition or file would be all that useful because I have plenty of memory. I've never had to reinstall Linux so I'm not sure why I would need a separate home. If I did bork my OS somehow I'm fairly confident I could repair it from a live distro. And even if I did end up having to save my home I could just copy the files I want to another drive if it really came to that.

[–] flux@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I have 64GB RAM and my 64GB swap still gets filled to 60% over time.

It just happens so that apps end up touching some memory once that they never then use again. Better use some SSD for that instead of RAM.

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In this case you could view a swap partition as a safety net. Put 20-30GB in a swap partition in case something goes wrong. You won't miss the disk space.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

why not zram as a safety net?

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never understood why people run without swap. There's basically no downside to having it. If you're running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you're on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you're probably not in an "ample RAM" situation anyway.

Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?

[–] Floey@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I have 64GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM, I only have a TB of storage. The only time I've ever filled up my RAM is due to memory leak.