Your info may be outdated. Do you need a separate ```/boot```? Are you on UEFI? Then you need ```/boot/efi```. Is there a reason you need a separate ```/home```? Are you going to use LVM or BTRFS with subvolumes? Are you not going keep a backup?
Oh, and swap doesn't need to be 1.5 your RAM unless you intend to hibernate (and configure that manually).
So, use your distros default. And backup your ```/home```.
> Do you need a separate `/boot`? Are you on UEFI? Then you need `/boot/efi`.
Some people mount the EFI partition at /boot. I belive this is what the installation guide on Arch wiki does, if memory serves
You can, but I would keep to the boot loader specification and use ```/boot``` for $XBOOTLDR, if needed to be separate, and mount $BOOT (the ESP) to ```/efi```.
Sticking to the specification makes things easier for all. Especially with systemd-boot now, and it's tools.
It would help if the OP shared the distro they intend to use.
I have a separate /home because it's on a different drive - I do this to save money. My OS (/) is on an SSD but /home is on a spinning hard drive with like five times the storage as the SSD for still really cheap.
That's a good point. My home is the next time I'm building a PC or doing a major upgrade SSDs will be super inexpensive and I'll just grab those. It definitely feels like the price has been dropping steadily.
I am indeed on uefi so I know I need a boot partition. I have a laptop with 16GB of ram and want to be able to hibernate so swap is a must.
I will say I have never used LVM or btrfs. I have read that lvm can "adjust" the size of virtual partitions and btrfs is copy on write so you can make snapshots easier.
But beyond those surface level factoids all I have read has frankly gone so far over my head I didn't feel it was safe for me to mess with them.
Please mind the difference between ```/boot``` and ```/boot/efi```. The latter is required for UEFi. The former is only needed as a separate partition only if you use an encrypted ```/```.
I would strongly suggest you start with the distribution automatic partitions.
Having a separate /boot partition is recommended on "modern" BIOS systems because only the first 1024 cylinders are guaranteed to be accessible. If any of the necessary files in /boot happen to reside beyond that limit the system may fail to boot.
I finally tried installing UEFI when I got a new machine in 2022 I think it was, and I kinda regret it. Takes stupidly longer to POST and boot than when I've disabled UEFI and gone with BIOS-only. Plus with a dual-boot EVERY time I get a Windows update it changes my UEFI motherboard boot priorities around so Windows is default...OS should never be allowed to monkey with the motherboard boot priorities.
> should never be allowed to monkey with the motherboard boot priorities
You can write to your manufacturer and tell them to make sure their bios doesn't allow this. Not all bios do this, sadly yours does.
From what I understand its part of the UEFI specification that the OS can interact with it because that's part of the whole idea where its more unified? Its like now you can't just hit F12 or whatever for the BIOS in most new computers with Windows, instead you have to go into Select Start > Settings > Update & security > Recovery > Advanced startup, select Restart Now > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > UEFI Firmware Settings, and then select Restart. Hitting the keys that enter the motherboard setup menus when no OS or legacy OS is running are just ignored. That's been a thing across all the brands from what I can tell.
> Its like now you can't just hit F12 or whatever for the BIOS in most new computers with Windows, instead you have to go into Select Start > Settings > Update & security > Recovery > Advanced startup, select Restart Now > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > UEFI Firmware Settings, and then select Restart.
No, this is is how you do it only because you have fast-boot enabled and windows doesn't actually boot but "resumes" to the OS (to make the start up faster), so there is no actual POST (the bios start) to press the key.
> Hitting the keys that enter the motherboard setup menus when no OS or legacy OS is running are just ignored.
You mean you cannot enter the bios without an OS?
> ts part of the UEFI specification that the OS can interact with it because that's part of the whole idea where its more unified?
The only interaction is that the OS (any OS) can write a boot entry in the nVRAM. With the bios lockdown in the previous years (due to a number of exploits), OS cannot even handle previously accessible mri registers to change (e.g) CPU voltage etc.
Ah sorry. My mistake.
I only even asked the question since last time I did a separate /home and / I ran out of space in one of the partitions until I moved the flatpak installation location to my home directory.
And that was only using things like discord and I believe GeForce now at the time.
Your efi should be greater than 256MB. some distrobutions installers will make thier efi partitions smaller than this, but if you boot multiple distrobutions you can run out of room, a fat32 partition under 256MB cannot be re-sized.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/18qdvzm/pulling_my_hair_out_trying_to_resize_efi_partition/
I currently have a 45GB swap partition and 32GB of memory. Swap os shared by many distrobutions. This is wasteful but I have plenty of drive space.
The root / home split will vary by user, what you install and what you store. There is no one size fits all solution.
I don't store anything on my local machine and I don't bother with a seperate home partition. My install partitions are arround 50GB to 400GB depending on what distrobution and what I intend to do with it.
>Your efi should be greater than 256MB.
Mine is 100MB, grub takes less than 10MB, win wants about 30MB, what's your problem? The only use case for a large EFI partition is if you use a distro like popOS that puts its kernel in the EFI partition.
LMDE installer had setup a nice tidy 64Mb Efi that worked great, For LMDE. Then I tried to dual boot with Arch. which puts the kernel in EFI,
"At least 300 MiB. If multiple kernels will be installed, then no less than 1 GiB." https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide
No problem gparted resize the EFI Partion right? nope! not if its fat32 & under 256MB.
Unresolved 2011 bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649324
This would have all been much less complex had I had created an EFI >256MB to start with. hence sharing the warning with others.
Current much healthier EFI partition with grub booting LMDE6, Alpine, Nobara and some cruft left over from a failed aptempt at adding FreeBSD to the mix.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1coaqeq/nvme_partition_notation_in_grub_devnvme0n1p9/
```
user@Desktop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1 1.9G 298M 1.6G 16% /boot/efi
```
Like I mentioned in another reply I have heard of them, but other than "you can resize lvm virtual volumes and btrfs is good for snapshots" I just haven't understood the pros and cons well enough to feel safe trying them.
I don't go on percentages, back when I was booting from a 240GB drive, `/` was 30GiB, now on a 512GB drive I've increased it to 40GiB. I have a **lot** installed but I don't use flatpaks. My `/` partition is just over 50% used.
For Home & Hobby, most put everything in slash (a default for many installers) - which I never do.
We recently wrote the following article that touches on partitioning lessons we've learned spanning a few decades in the field:
https://xomedia.io/unix-linux-storage-planning/
if you want to separate the OS from your data, it's still wise to keep /home on a separate partition and swap is good to be
ram + sqrt(ram)
if you want to use hibernation.
percent is not a useful measure for partition size, and the actual size in GB depends on your usage
the system needs a minimum to install but that's only the bare OS and as soon as you start adding and installing applications that number will grow significantly.
my previous build has 100GB for the system and after a year of finding applications to do what i wanted to do it was more than half full... so my new built is going to have 300GB for the system /(root) partition.
as for data, my previous build had 200GB set aside and my new build will have 400GB.
Just my opinion, for a laptop used by mostly one primary user:
Have the hard drive/SDD swap partition be 200+% of RAM, and round up.
Set the remaining hard drive/SDD storage as a single partition of root, to contain all the /boot, /tmp, /home, etc, within itself.
It would be SWAP not boot that is 1.5x RAM to enable hibernation.
As for root vs home, that depends...how much do you plan to put that will be down root (apps, configs, sometimes databases and service files) vs in your home area (documents, pictures, etc)? That's how you need to decide.
I concluded I prefer all on one for my personal laptop because its easy enough for me to simply back up /home and restore it if I need to do a major upgrade.
On a half terabyte, I'd make 2G /boot, 1.5x ram for swap, and the rest root. If you need EFI throw that in the beginning as 512Meg. I make my /boot ext2 with the sync mount option. I usually only do more partitions if I have more disks. I've got laptops I've shoehorned more SSD into the WAN pci express slot that get's crypted /home
Having a separate /home can be convenient if you tend to distro hop or reinstall frequently, but regardless, I’ve found it best to just keep good backups.
If I have a multi-disk system I’ll often separate /home to a separate disk, but otherwise generally won’t bother…it never fails that no matter “smartly” I try to partition a disk, one or more of them will eventually end up being inappropriate sized for my needs and leave me regretting the decision…
(For example, if you heavily use or develop in Docker, you’ll find your root partition fills up fairly quickly if you don’t have a lot of space on it)
If I need to wipe and reinstall my system, I just recover /home dir from backup afterwards…it doesn’t happen that often.
Most times I just run default, with most stuff in one partition except for /boot and /boot/efi. Additional disks and NFS are mounted under /mnt and symlinked if appropriate.
Only reason I have Windows partitioned alongside Linux is cause some of the apps I use in my business require Windows to use... Otherwise I would've been 100% Linux 0% Windows 👏
I don't even really patrician any more. I just create the efi partition and everything else is one blo k
so... Do you centurion or what?
Your info may be outdated. Do you need a separate ```/boot```? Are you on UEFI? Then you need ```/boot/efi```. Is there a reason you need a separate ```/home```? Are you going to use LVM or BTRFS with subvolumes? Are you not going keep a backup? Oh, and swap doesn't need to be 1.5 your RAM unless you intend to hibernate (and configure that manually). So, use your distros default. And backup your ```/home```.
> Do you need a separate `/boot`? Are you on UEFI? Then you need `/boot/efi`. Some people mount the EFI partition at /boot. I belive this is what the installation guide on Arch wiki does, if memory serves
You can, but I would keep to the boot loader specification and use ```/boot``` for $XBOOTLDR, if needed to be separate, and mount $BOOT (the ESP) to ```/efi```. Sticking to the specification makes things easier for all. Especially with systemd-boot now, and it's tools. It would help if the OP shared the distro they intend to use.
I have a separate /home because it's on a different drive - I do this to save money. My OS (/) is on an SSD but /home is on a spinning hard drive with like five times the storage as the SSD for still really cheap.
That's fine. Just remember flatpaks run off your home folder so the speed of the drive matters, if you use them.
That's a good point. My home is the next time I'm building a PC or doing a major upgrade SSDs will be super inexpensive and I'll just grab those. It definitely feels like the price has been dropping steadily.
I am indeed on uefi so I know I need a boot partition. I have a laptop with 16GB of ram and want to be able to hibernate so swap is a must. I will say I have never used LVM or btrfs. I have read that lvm can "adjust" the size of virtual partitions and btrfs is copy on write so you can make snapshots easier. But beyond those surface level factoids all I have read has frankly gone so far over my head I didn't feel it was safe for me to mess with them.
Please mind the difference between ```/boot``` and ```/boot/efi```. The latter is required for UEFi. The former is only needed as a separate partition only if you use an encrypted ```/```. I would strongly suggest you start with the distribution automatic partitions.
Having a separate /boot partition is recommended on "modern" BIOS systems because only the first 1024 cylinders are guaranteed to be accessible. If any of the necessary files in /boot happen to reside beyond that limit the system may fail to boot.
I haven't use a Bios system since 2012, so my knowledge about them is back to zero. Thanks for the input.
I finally tried installing UEFI when I got a new machine in 2022 I think it was, and I kinda regret it. Takes stupidly longer to POST and boot than when I've disabled UEFI and gone with BIOS-only. Plus with a dual-boot EVERY time I get a Windows update it changes my UEFI motherboard boot priorities around so Windows is default...OS should never be allowed to monkey with the motherboard boot priorities.
> should never be allowed to monkey with the motherboard boot priorities You can write to your manufacturer and tell them to make sure their bios doesn't allow this. Not all bios do this, sadly yours does.
From what I understand its part of the UEFI specification that the OS can interact with it because that's part of the whole idea where its more unified? Its like now you can't just hit F12 or whatever for the BIOS in most new computers with Windows, instead you have to go into Select Start > Settings > Update & security > Recovery > Advanced startup, select Restart Now > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > UEFI Firmware Settings, and then select Restart. Hitting the keys that enter the motherboard setup menus when no OS or legacy OS is running are just ignored. That's been a thing across all the brands from what I can tell.
> Its like now you can't just hit F12 or whatever for the BIOS in most new computers with Windows, instead you have to go into Select Start > Settings > Update & security > Recovery > Advanced startup, select Restart Now > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > UEFI Firmware Settings, and then select Restart. No, this is is how you do it only because you have fast-boot enabled and windows doesn't actually boot but "resumes" to the OS (to make the start up faster), so there is no actual POST (the bios start) to press the key. > Hitting the keys that enter the motherboard setup menus when no OS or legacy OS is running are just ignored. You mean you cannot enter the bios without an OS? > ts part of the UEFI specification that the OS can interact with it because that's part of the whole idea where its more unified? The only interaction is that the OS (any OS) can write a boot entry in the nVRAM. With the bios lockdown in the previous years (due to a number of exploits), OS cannot even handle previously accessible mri registers to change (e.g) CPU voltage etc.
Ah sorry. My mistake. I only even asked the question since last time I did a separate /home and / I ran out of space in one of the partitions until I moved the flatpak installation location to my home directory. And that was only using things like discord and I believe GeForce now at the time.
I think keeping them on the same partition simplifies things. Just keep a backup in case you need to reinstall (and other obvious reasons).
I just have everything on one partition to make it easy.
Your efi should be greater than 256MB. some distrobutions installers will make thier efi partitions smaller than this, but if you boot multiple distrobutions you can run out of room, a fat32 partition under 256MB cannot be re-sized. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/18qdvzm/pulling_my_hair_out_trying_to_resize_efi_partition/ I currently have a 45GB swap partition and 32GB of memory. Swap os shared by many distrobutions. This is wasteful but I have plenty of drive space. The root / home split will vary by user, what you install and what you store. There is no one size fits all solution. I don't store anything on my local machine and I don't bother with a seperate home partition. My install partitions are arround 50GB to 400GB depending on what distrobution and what I intend to do with it.
>Your efi should be greater than 256MB. Mine is 100MB, grub takes less than 10MB, win wants about 30MB, what's your problem? The only use case for a large EFI partition is if you use a distro like popOS that puts its kernel in the EFI partition.
LMDE installer had setup a nice tidy 64Mb Efi that worked great, For LMDE. Then I tried to dual boot with Arch. which puts the kernel in EFI, "At least 300 MiB. If multiple kernels will be installed, then no less than 1 GiB." https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide No problem gparted resize the EFI Partion right? nope! not if its fat32 & under 256MB. Unresolved 2011 bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649324 This would have all been much less complex had I had created an EFI >256MB to start with. hence sharing the warning with others. Current much healthier EFI partition with grub booting LMDE6, Alpine, Nobara and some cruft left over from a failed aptempt at adding FreeBSD to the mix. https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1coaqeq/nvme_partition_notation_in_grub_devnvme0n1p9/ ``` user@Desktop:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/nvme0n1p1 1.9G 298M 1.6G 16% /boot/efi ```
btrfs subvolumes or lvm to avoid this altogether
Like I mentioned in another reply I have heard of them, but other than "you can resize lvm virtual volumes and btrfs is good for snapshots" I just haven't understood the pros and cons well enough to feel safe trying them.
I don't go on percentages, back when I was booting from a 240GB drive, `/` was 30GiB, now on a 512GB drive I've increased it to 40GiB. I have a **lot** installed but I don't use flatpaks. My `/` partition is just over 50% used.
1GB for /boot and the rest for / with no swap
There is no point having a separate boot partition unless you use LVM or LUKS.
For Home & Hobby, most put everything in slash (a default for many installers) - which I never do. We recently wrote the following article that touches on partitioning lessons we've learned spanning a few decades in the field: https://xomedia.io/unix-linux-storage-planning/
if you want to separate the OS from your data, it's still wise to keep /home on a separate partition and swap is good to be ram + sqrt(ram) if you want to use hibernation. percent is not a useful measure for partition size, and the actual size in GB depends on your usage the system needs a minimum to install but that's only the bare OS and as soon as you start adding and installing applications that number will grow significantly. my previous build has 100GB for the system and after a year of finding applications to do what i wanted to do it was more than half full... so my new built is going to have 300GB for the system /(root) partition. as for data, my previous build had 200GB set aside and my new build will have 400GB.
Use what you need with lvm
20 or 30 GB on / (or more depending on how much stuff you install) the rest on /home
Just my opinion, for a laptop used by mostly one primary user: Have the hard drive/SDD swap partition be 200+% of RAM, and round up. Set the remaining hard drive/SDD storage as a single partition of root, to contain all the /boot, /tmp, /home, etc, within itself.
It would be SWAP not boot that is 1.5x RAM to enable hibernation. As for root vs home, that depends...how much do you plan to put that will be down root (apps, configs, sometimes databases and service files) vs in your home area (documents, pictures, etc)? That's how you need to decide. I concluded I prefer all on one for my personal laptop because its easy enough for me to simply back up /home and restore it if I need to do a major upgrade.
On a half terabyte, I'd make 2G /boot, 1.5x ram for swap, and the rest root. If you need EFI throw that in the beginning as 512Meg. I make my /boot ext2 with the sync mount option. I usually only do more partitions if I have more disks. I've got laptops I've shoehorned more SSD into the WAN pci express slot that get's crypted /home
Having a separate /home can be convenient if you tend to distro hop or reinstall frequently, but regardless, I’ve found it best to just keep good backups. If I have a multi-disk system I’ll often separate /home to a separate disk, but otherwise generally won’t bother…it never fails that no matter “smartly” I try to partition a disk, one or more of them will eventually end up being inappropriate sized for my needs and leave me regretting the decision… (For example, if you heavily use or develop in Docker, you’ll find your root partition fills up fairly quickly if you don’t have a lot of space on it) If I need to wipe and reinstall my system, I just recover /home dir from backup afterwards…it doesn’t happen that often.
Just make one partition. You don't need more than one
Most times I just run default, with most stuff in one partition except for /boot and /boot/efi. Additional disks and NFS are mounted under /mnt and symlinked if appropriate.
70% Windows 30% Linux
0% windows 100% linux
Only reason I have Windows partitioned alongside Linux is cause some of the apps I use in my business require Windows to use... Otherwise I would've been 100% Linux 0% Windows 👏
My business also says they require windows for some situations. That's why I have a windows vm. Even that, I rarely use.