11h ago

Come to the dark side no seriously we have cookies

31 comments

Recovered a broken Kubuntu install I tried switching to that got broken on a missconfig'd update, half broken Linux install and it was still better and more featured than my W11... I am hopeful that I can finally make the switch permanent
- I recommend making your /home a separate partition. It makes switching distros easier and also allows you to not encrypt your installation and only your own files, saving you from the headache in the case LUKS doesn't work properly anymore.
  
  I thought a bunch of config files and Biden folders and stuff are in /home. If I switch, will I not end up with a bunch of orphaned files from (in my case) Debian just cluttering the place up? I did the separate partition thing as is so often recommended.
  
  Totally agree. I take it a step further and keep my /home on a separate encrypted M.2, and my /boot on an old 256GB SSD. That setup lets me fully encrypt root while keeping /boot accessible. I use grml-rescueboot to add ISOs to the GRUB menu and the extra space on /boot is handy.
  It's been a while, but I remember encrypting just the home folder used to break SSH key auth unless the user was already logged in locally, because their .ssh/authorized_keys file wasn't available. Pre-shared keys make scp and tab completion really convenient, so that was kind of a pain.
  
  At what point does an encrypted /home partition or LVM Volume or Drive get decrypted? Toward the end of the OS booting? I played with an encrypted LUKS single partition setup that asked me before the OS visibly booted.
  
  How much storage space do you allocate for the OS?
  
  I allocated 75gb on my 1tb drive to Fedora and most of the rest (~900gb) to my /home. After over 2 years and a few upgrades (Workstation 37-42 IIRC) it’s sitting at 64.2% used.
  The greybeards I learned from many moons ago liked to split /var, /bin, and /tmp from / as well as /home. I haven’t gone that far in some time though. As always YMMV.
  
  Not OC - I read a recommendation of 20GB on reddit, only to get to the limit very fast and repartition. From my experience, 40GB is the magic number.
  
  Honestly, I'd argue it depends on the use case. A lightweight distro meant for basic tasks will never consume as much as a gaming one. Factoring in that your snapshots will naturally grow over time (and thus disk space) will mean that repartitioning, and getting bigger hard drives, is always a thing.
  I'd still just trust the general installation guide, if it offers automatic partition allocation. Just only do partitions for /boot, / and /home, I've never found much use for /var /log and such as a separate partition, at least as a home user.
  And when in doubt: use LVM with ext4 for dynamic partitions. BTRFS has a similar feature, but it's still experimental, and thus potentially unstable.

31 comments