Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.
But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.
EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.
On my PC and all my home servers I keep my root partition at 10GB and haven’t had any issues (although I keep everything that isn’t hardware related or a system utility in home).
On my PC I crammed arch, all of KDE (+extra KDE utilities), and some other system stuff like LACT and distrobox in the 10GB root partition and run almost everything else as a flatpak installed to home.
On my servers I do the same thing but all my services are in podman containers in /opt.
Having all the software needed to make the machine work be isolated from my custom home junk makes me feel better, and I like that I can mount root as read-only to make it immutable
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don’t lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.
Separate /home is such a scam. Never have I run out of home space, but boy is 27GB not enough for a root partition that runs any kind of service.
Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.
But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.
EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.
On my PC and all my home servers I keep my root partition at 10GB and haven’t had any issues (although I keep everything that isn’t hardware related or a system utility in home).
On my PC I crammed arch, all of KDE (+extra KDE utilities), and some other system stuff like LACT and distrobox in the 10GB root partition and run almost everything else as a flatpak installed to home.
On my servers I do the same thing but all my services are in podman containers in /opt.
Having all the software needed to make the machine work be isolated from my custom home junk makes me feel better, and I like that I can mount root as read-only to make it immutable
/ size becomes an issue when you install games via pacman
symlink the directories to somewhere on another partition
I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD
I only do it on my ancient laptop because for some reason, it makes things a little faster. I don’t know why.
It’s the opposite for me.
Probably my installed games alone are larger than that
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don’t lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.