One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table?

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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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.

Atemu, (edited )
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

What you’re doing is perfectly fine.

It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.

If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.

phoenixz,

All fine though I would recommend you look into lvm, gives you easier control over sizing and resizing, even online.

msage,

Isn’t it better to use btrfs nowadays?

I’m also old-school lvm person, but I put btrfs in my Gentoo desktop, though I don’t actually utilize it at all.

phoenixz,

Yes and no

Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them

Kindness,

You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.

Butterface excels at keeping data safe-ish or at least lets you know when to throw in the towel, and which bits you’ve lost. It’s also write intensive if you open a file with write permissions, which is harder on your drives.

Btrfs is great for the data you want to keep long term.

Also UEFI has some nice advantages if your computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.

Do what works for you, and keep on keeping on.

chunkyhairball,

You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.

This. Too many partitions for a home system can get pretty stupid pretty quick. But OP has just the right amount of separation between system and data. I’ve known people that were uncomfortable without breaking /var (or /var/log) off into its own partition, but that’s really overkill for a stable, personal system, IMO.

computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.

I feel personally called out by this statement!

Seriously, the big one for me, is that I like having drive encryption. It protects my computer and data should it fall into the hands of, say, burglers. I also like turning it up to the elevens simply because I’m a bit TOO paranoid. You really need more than 1GB of ram to do argon2id key derivation, which is what fde is all moving to for unlocking purposes, and BIOS just can’t do that. My main workstation is using a powerful, but older mobo with gigabyte’s old, horrid faux EFI support.

Another good one for the security-conscientious person is Secure Boot, meaning that you control what kernels and bootloading code is allowed to boot on your computer, preventing Evil Maid-type attacks: wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

That’s pretty far fetched, but maybe not too out of the question if you, say, work for a bank or accountant.

Of course none of that matters if you don’t practice good operational security.

avidamoeba,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

If you reinstall often a separate /home makes some sense. Otherwise it’s probably pointless. I’d try to get to a point where I don’t have to reinstall my base OS and invest in an automatic backup solution.

selokichtli,

They are probably using timeshift or some advanced feature in btrfs to auto-generate snapshots so they can go back to a working state using one of them.

The way you do it is probably getting old. I say this because I do the same, but to use several distros with a shared home partition, provided I have the same GID and UID for the users. This is not recommended but only once I’ve had a problem and it was easy to solve, so I kept doing it. Installed Fedora recently with defaults in one partition and they use one fat partition (EFI), and one btrfs partition with a logical volume and some unfamiliar partitioning. I think we are maybe missing some new technologies.

nixcamic,

Why would you put home on ext4 instead of btrfs?

mambabasa,
@mambabasa@slrpnk.net avatar

I didn’t need home folder snapshots.

nixcamic,

Btrfs offers a lot more than just snapshots.

mambabasa,
@mambabasa@slrpnk.net avatar

Like what?

nixcamic,

Data integrity protection, higher resiliency, less chance of being corrupted, etc.

mambabasa,
@mambabasa@slrpnk.net avatar

But I heard ext4 was more stable. What are the trade offs?

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

I’d use sister partitions for everything but swap, just use zram for swap, it’s faster and doesn’t need it’s own separate partition

mambabasa,
@mambabasa@slrpnk.net avatar

How do I set that up?

elscallr, (edited )
@elscallr@lemmy.world avatar

Boot from a live distro so you can modify your boot disk. Use the disk utility to create partitions. Copy the data to the relevant partitions ensuring to maintain file ownership and permissions. Modify /etc/fstab to mount the partitions at the designated locations in the filesystem.

I don’t bother putting anything but /home on its own dedicated partition, but if you ask 10 people this question you’ll get 12 opinions, so just do what feels right.

mambabasa,
@mambabasa@slrpnk.net avatar

Thanks

elscallr, (edited )
@elscallr@lemmy.world avatar

Note: Create your partitions from your empty space. You may need to resize your existing partition to do this. But don’t practice on your main drive.

This is a simple job, in that the steps are few, but it’s something that causes catastrophic data loss if you get it wrong.

I’d recommend buying a cheap second drive, doesn’t have to be big or even good. Partition it, mount it, make sure you can make the partitions automatically mount, teach yourself to copy data around, umount it and remount, make sure you got it right.

Just… these are all very simple things. I wouldn’t hesitate to repartition my own drives. But if you fuck it up you fuck it up good. Make sure you know the operations you’re taking first. Measure twice, cut once, all that jazz.

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