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.
@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.