On 2014-01-28 16:05, Peter wrote:
I always have /home separate, and /boot too. But that's as far as I go usually. My new SSD isn't huge, only 120GB. I'll be keeping a lot of personal files like music / images on portable USB-attached drives for portability to other (also v. old) machines. So splitting the root partition further isn't great as I'm not the best judge of how much space to allocate and which might then go wasted. From that perspective it's probably better to just have a larger /.
A single root without a separate home (or others) has some advantages when space is limited. And disadvantages, of course. With a single partition you can not reinstall the system keeping home intact: that's the more frequent consequence. Of course, there are remedies: instead, you can do on site upgrades. Or you can make a backup, reinstall, then recover home from the backup. I understand that Ubuntu does it that way, no separate home. Another disadvantage is damage contention: with several partitions, in case of filesystem disaster, it usually limits itself to a single partition. Another is that you can not configure for specific needs, like making tmp noexec, or smaller blocks for nntp or maildir storage. Or different filesystem types. But there is the obvious advantage of not wasting space, which is important on small disks. There is no single best decision for all the multiple needs... -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 12.3 x86_64 "Dartmouth" at Telcontar)