Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

  • FAT32: EFI
  • BTRFS: /
  • Swap: Swap
  • Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

  • seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    How does that work with you’re installing a new system? Do the subvolumes just show up like partitions?

    • Tiuku
      1·
      1 year ago

      In tools like lsblk? Nope. They appear as directories, usually in the top-level subvolume, which typically isn’t mounted anywhere in the system.

      Then you just create mount entries in /etc/fstab just like you would with partitions, this time just using the subvol= option as mentioned above. I don’t know if there are any installers that do this for you. Archwiki – as usual – has good documentation on this.

      • seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        1 year ago

        So, it doesn’t sound like it would be useful for me, since the reason why I have separate partitions in the first place is so that I can re-install a distro or install a new distro without having to back up /home first.