if i want to make a separate partition for /home than the root one, how big should i make it versus the root partition? like, presumably most of the space would be for where the users live, but how much should i leave for other os stuff? 20gb, 100gb, 500gb? i dont really have a head for the sizes of things in linux yet
@typhlosion Typically, you would estimate how much space you need for your system, which tends to be a relatively static amount of space, and leave what's left over, which in the context of modern storage devices is huge majority of the total storage space, for home.
On home use Linux, /usr tends to be the largest system directory; that's where almost all of the software that you install will be living. If you have a previous system with roughly the amount of software that you want to instal into your new system, you can check how big your /usr was there as an estimate. Add some spare, though; as you will be upgrading your software, some of it will inevitably grow. And a couple of extra gigabytes just in case are dirt cheap nowadays.
Also beware /var, which in home use tends to hold odds and ends, some of which can be regularly thrown out (such as old log files and in apt-based systems, cached dpkg files). If you were running, say, a large mail server, you might have a large bunch of production files under /var, though, and you would need to take that into account as well.
@riley noted... thank you very much. this is a single-user home pc so i shouldn't run into many weird edge cases for usage
this is also my first ever proper linux install, so i dont have a previous setup to compare it to. i guess i can always resize these partitions from a live boot later, right? so i guess i could just be conservative for now and resize the partitions one way or another if i need to
@typhlosion Resizing partitions can be done, but it's a PITA, especially if you haven't done it before, and there's a risk of catastrophic data loss. I'd suggest either taking a guess and erring in side of making root a bit too large, or potentially just not splitting your root from your home this time. It's not like there's a pressing reason to; it's just an administrative tactic that sometimes mitigates certain risks.
What distribution do you plan to use?
@riley oops i have already done it. this was for the manjaro install that i already did last night
@typhlosion Okay, so it's a solved problem.
@riley at this point yeah ;w; you were really helpful though. i left 100gb of space for the root partition and put the rest to /home
@typhlosion 100GB is probably a bit of an overkill. I think I haven't gone over 8GB in any of my home machines.
But if you can afford the space, It won't hurt, and you'll have plenty of space for installing fancy software into it. You'll probably need more than I ever needed if you're going to use a lot of Docker images, for example, because these are heavily redundant. Installing large applications such as Vivado can also eat up the gigabytes.
@typhlosion
What I actually personally did was use two different drives, putting an ssd for the root directory, then a big hard drive for home.
But then, I personally tend to have lots of junk laying around on my computer, and it's mostly in the home directory.
Also, doing this means even if I totally format my ssd, most of my data's fine because it's on the other drive.
I ran for a long time without having home be separate at all, so it's not really necessary. Comes in handy if I need to reinstall, though.
@SweetAIBelle yeah the main thing for me is that i don't know for sure if i want to 100% commit to this distro yet, so i figure having a separate home partition of some kind is best in case i want to pull up roots and install something else
@typhlosion
Totally understood. I've reinstalled a few times since separating the two, and it makes reinstalls a lot easier.
With my personal setup, since they are on different drives, I wound up with root being 439GB, and 3.6T for my home.
@SweetAIBelle i would use a separate disk altogether for home, but the other thing to consider is that i'm dual booting on this system, and would like windows to have some of that space too, so it sort of becomes a balancing act of how do i split up this space
i figure since im booting linux off a 1tb nvme drive, i can just break off some of that space for a separate home partition
@typhlosion I can see some other folks have already given you some good advice. I'd just like to add that I leave some unallocated space in between the root and home partitions if they're sharing a drive so I can expand either one into that space later if needed.
For my part, I think 50-100 GB is a good size for root. I'm at 21/50 used on my current computer.
@typhlosion I currently have a 100 Gb root and it's just 35% full. I mostly keep it that big becasue of /var (mostly Docker volumes).
Although I must say that I have quite a lot installed in my /home partition (via Linuxbrew, asdf and just programs I build from source or download as Appsmith apps).