this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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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.
Yeah, that's a risk. However you'll always risk having leftovers from programs, even when continuing to use an OS, simply because you might switch programs, the developer rethinks where they store the config files, etc..
In most cases these files are relatively small and won't be very noticeable in the long run. However if that still bothers you have no other choice but to cleanup your config files regardless.
Also, those config files are generally only for your own user, i.e. user-related configurations, not program-dependent ones. System configs are generally stored outside the user profiles.
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.
Generally during the mounting process, which is pretty early on at the OS boot process.
How much storage space do you allocate for the OS?
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.
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) itβs 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 havenβt gone that far in some time though. As always YMMV.