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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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.
What you're doing is perfectly fine.
It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved
/home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such "bad" distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.If you were installing "manually" and had full control over this, I'd advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.