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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Partitioning Your Linux Drives: Does It Provide Any Benefits? (odysee.com)

submitted 9 months ago by prl to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

But why /boot?

I would much rather split out /home if I'm going to split anything, so it can go through a future reinstall more smoothly. With /var being a more distant second candidate, because I've been burnt on several occasions by various programs eating up all disk space somewhere under it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you want to be compliant to the UEFI spec, the partition holding your EFI binaries must be formatted as a file system related to FAT (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition). This is not something you want for you system drive, so a separate partition makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Isn't EFI a separate partition? Different from /boot?

[–] pete_the_cat 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

They can be the same partition, they are for different purposes though. EFI holds the EFI binaries as the name implies, while /boot holds the initrd, kernel, and the bootloader config files.

If they are the same partition, /boot needs to be formatted as FAT32 and have EFI as a subdirectory. Otherwise they can be separate partitions, either way the partition that contains the EFI directory needs to be formatted as FAT32.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For EFI probably.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Its best practice to just split out /efi in that case

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I keep / and /home on a btrfs subvolumes, so I do not have to think about their sizes and also can do snapshots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

How do btrfs snapshots work?

I use borg to take snapshots from / and /home because I can be selective (it has include and exclude patterns, like rsync). Also because it does deduplication (at file and chunk level too, saves a ton of space) and compression. And of course a big factor is that I can keep the backups somewhere else.

I've looked into zfs snapshots but they seem really limited in comparison. Good for recovering accidental deletes or changes if you catch on soon enough, but not very useful otherwise.