Do I have to use a seperate /home partition for openSUSE and which fliesystem to use?

I’ve made the switch to openSUSE, and it’s been so stable so far. But I’m a former Manjaro KDE user. You can call me a noob when it comes to openSUSE.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/side-by-side-opensuse-tumbleweed-and-leap/

Because of this it is very important to keep your home directories, work  and data files separate from the root filesystem.  A simplistic "root  filesystem only" installation is not likely to be sufficient for  Tumbleweed - but then again, I would hope that anyone who is  sufficiently experienced and competent to install and run Tumbleweed  would never consider such a basic installation anyway

This writer made me a bit confused. I don’t need the perks of BTRFS or XFS on my systems since I don’t care about snapshots and the laptop I’m going to use openSUSE on (My college laptop) has 32GB MMC, so XFS is overkill too IMO. Is it safe to use an Ext4 for a seperate / partition on openSUSE like I do on all other distros. Some people say “openSUSE works different, don’t do that…” as openSUSE users what’s your experience?

By the way, do you recommend Tumbleweed for my college laptop. We have a really slow internet there with a sinister security verification, so if I can’t access to GUI, it will be hard for me to fix the issue. In college, our download speeds are like 20Kb/sec to 40Kb/sec :frowning:

In general, using separate file systems for parts of the directory tree is done for several reasons. Amongst them are:

  1. physical separation of a part of the tree to protect against “full file system” on e.g. / when people fill up /home;
  2. being able to install a new (version of) the operating system without touching (user) data (again /home is a good example);
  3. wanting to have a different type of file system for different parts of the tree (e.g. wanting Btrfs for/ and xfs for /home and/or ext4 for /database and/or NTFS for a part also used by another system in a multi boot situation);
  4. wanting to have part of the tree on a complete different type of storage, like / on a partition of the boot disk and the database on a RAID (maybe using LVM) of several other disks.
  5. more …

So it is, like may other decissions a system manager has to take, up to you.

But, for a simple home system (decide yourself if your system(s) fit this), the general advice is to create a separate /home (easy for upgrading, users may fill up /home but can not fill up /). Also, since openSUSE introduced Btrfs, the recommendation is to use it with snapshotting for / (ease of roll-back after a crippling update) and zfs for /home (I am not sure why zfs is recommended over ext4 here, but others can tell you).
These are also defaults on a fresh installation. What is the use of recommendations when they are not the default? Defaults are there to give those who do know less a fine running system when they just install without many thoughts.

Same for the recommendation for the size of / (40 GB when Btrfs, 20 GB when not). They are also the defaults.

But again, it is up to you to weigh all pros and cons of a certain configuration and you can of course then install to your liking by deviating from the defaults. The installer gives you plenty of freedom.

But, is it risky not to use a seperate /home partition on Tumbleweed as that zdnet writer mentioned?

With a well-tested filesystem and regular backups, the risk of not using a separate /home partition is vanishingly small, in my experience.

I’ve been using openSUSE 42.1 to 15.0 with only one primary ext4 partition. Until recently, I didn’t even use a separate swap partition (dynamically adding a swap file always being an option, if ever necessary). I’ve used ext4 since about 2010, I think, and the whole world has been using ext4 on Android for a similar time. That’s an installed base of millions of consumer devices and uncounted appliances, servers and embedded systems.

If you’re using SSD only like I do, you may consider some of the filesystems specialized for flash memory, but they are not nearly as hardened and tested as ext4. All you need to do with SSDs is leave enough free space for its internal wear-leveling mechanics, run fstrim (if you disabled that overactive systemd-fstrim service like I did) and smartctl (with smartd disabled for the same reason) once a month, shutdown cleanly every time and … make backups. Have a lot of fun!

No, not risky at all.

However, I always use a separate “/home”. One of my gripes with Windows is that it wants to put everything in one big partition.

For me, the benefit of a separate “/home”, is that I can do a clean reinstall (perhaps to a newer version) while retaining the previous “/home”. Similarly, I can back up “/home” separately from backup of the system. However, some people prefer one big partition for everything, and that works fine too. It’s a personal decision.

As you can read above, as many solutions as persons. :wink:

I do not use Tumblewee, but I can understand that using Tumbleweed, as being a rolling release, you will roll forward often. But from time to time, you may feel the need to roll backward. And for backward rolling, snapshots (and thus Btrfs) is a good solution IMHO. But you can of course live very well with TW and Ext4.

And for the separate /home, I use it for those systems that are real “user” used for for day to day scores. OTOH I have a system where I put the backups on. That is a text only system and has in fact only one “normal” user to log in (remember, never log in as root). Taht user has almost no data in it’s $HOME (a few scripts may be). So no separate /home. But for all the backups, I created a separate /backup file system for the same reasom that the other systems have a separate/home. Separation of data from the system.

And what do you mean by “risky”? It is risky to have a file system because it can break. It is risky to have a computer, it can cause fires. Living is risky.

But you make me curious. Why are you being so afraid of simply use a separate /home?

Hi
I use btrfs for / and it includes /home, I use a separate data partition with xfs (I guess a pseudo home) for my files and use softlinks to things like Downloads, Pictures, Documents, standard config files (eg ~/.bashrc) etc. I’m not running snapshots these days on my main day to day laptops one runs Tumbleweed the other SLES 15. I back up my important /data to a NAS, this gets backed up to an external drive.

Unless you need bleeding edge software or the very latest version of packages I would stick with Leap 15 for a small-disk laptop and limited download bandwidth. Tumbleweed provides large upgrades each week that might fill up your disk, even if temporarily, and clog your internet connection during upgrading. If Leap runs well on your laptop, it is rock solid these days and will not disappoint you unless you have special needs, like developing software for the latest hardware or the like.

There is no miracle here.

No system is once and for all - not even windoze, or do you believe so?

openSUSE versions do change as well over the years, and its just more comfortable to change to a newer version if you have your personal data stored on a separate partition.

In case of an upgrade you may still need to remove those hidden files and directories. But you don’t have to remove your personal data, which probably won’t change, or does it? :wink:

I’ve used Ext4 for everything since it came out and never a problem, as soon as I left Btrfs I tried it but I had problems with snapper and I abandoned it

Still btrfs for / here and ext4 for /home, but since I never reinstall ( Tumbleweed ), my next, NVME and bigger, SSD will have btrfs only. I sync everything important to my Nextcloud instance. And I do use the snapper regularly to undo support experiments.

Re-reading the OP I understand that the laptop to be used has only 32 GB of internal (MMC) disk storage.
That rules out the use of BTRFS with snapshots (minimum recommended of 40 GB for / root only) and I don’t see a case for using BTRFS without snapshots on such a setup.
I don’t see a compelling reason for using XFS on such a tiny disc either. That leaves us (or, better, the OP) with our old proven friend EXT4.
Whether to use a separate /home or not depends on the use case. With Leap (and EXT4) I had no need for reinstalling the system in years unless I chose to, so I don’t see the use of a single partition as a significant risk.
The alternative would be to set up 12 to 16 GB for the root filesystem and the balance for a separate /home, both formatted to EXT4. This would be a bit safer than a single partition with Tumbleweed, to rule out the possibility of an unfortunate upgrade rocking the college laptop just the night before an exam, but not upgrading in the few days before an exam or having all important files backed up regularly could give the same level of safety IMHO :wink:

I’ve been using and experimenting on Leap with single Ext4 / partition, and I should say, that’s what I need for college :slight_smile:

It is still a very good idea to keep you home (personal data on a separate partition for many reasons

You only need 2 or 3 files systems for Linux to work fine. We used to have separate file systems because we only had 10mb drives.

If you have a newer bios with UEFI requirements - you need a fat32 partition for /boot/EFI or boot/efi - I made mine 512 mb for growth in the future. on small hard drives it is 32mb.

You should have a swap space at least 1 times as large as memory or larger - if you have the space 32gb

I make all other files into / as ext4 - it is old and reliable.

Backup everything to an external USB drive every week. Here is a sample backup script I use - I know it works as I have restored to a different drive and tested it. You need a bootable OpenSUSE image to restore from - I use GekkoLinux as it is OpenSUSE 15 based image patched to the last 20 days or so.

file list - the only file systems to backup - you really don’t need tmp but I back it up anyway

~# cd /root
~# cat list
bin boot dev downloads etc home lib lib64 mnt opt root sbin selinux srv tmp usr var 

backup script - assumes bleachbit is installed and configured for the user and root - run as root - replace “user” with your username - replace “/run/media/backup/” with the usb backup drive path.

~# cat bk1
cd /
journalctl --vacuum-time=1d
/usr/bin/bleachbit -c --preset
su user -c "/usr/bin/bleachbit -c --preset"
tar cvf /run/media/backup/backup1.tar --warning=no-file-ignored `cat /root/list` 2>/log-stderr | tee /log-stdout

These are the opinion of someone that has been using Unix/Linux since 1973 - it took until 1974 for my Unix to boot to a command prompt - back then you had to write a lot of you own drivers and terminal definitions. Others may disagree with my 2-3 file system approach but it is hard to argue that is does not work as I have installed 100’s of sites this way backing up to centralized backup servers. I have Oracle, Informix, MySQL files on separate filesystems for performance and backup issues. They are all setup with LVM to allow for realtime file expansion but they are still ext4 or raw partitions.

Veritas File system (LVM as HP called theirs and Linux adapted) was created to allow multiple disks to exist as a single file system - today we partition a large disk with LVM to make it look like multiple disks. I use LVM to mirror disks in high availability systems. It makes replacing dead disks easy without having to reboot the computer.