I learned that for perfomance reasons it is best to place /home at a SSD (in a separate partition).
Large private data can be on a HDD, and be assoziated to the
other default subdirs of /home (pictures, documents etc.).
I do not quite understand you. The directory /home is the place in the system directory tree where normally (it is a convention) the so called “home directories” of the users are placed. And when applications have configurations per user and use cache per user they are in that user’s home directory for obvious reasons.
When you understand the Unix/Linux concept of the one and only directory tree on a running system (contrary to some other operating systems which can have more then one directory tree), you should be able to understand that there must be at least one file system (mounted at /, the root of the tree) and that branches of that tree can be put on other file systems when needed. It is e.g. a well known practice to put /home on a file system.
But according to need one could put the home directory of a specific user (let us give it the user name user42 as an example) on it’s own file system. That would then be mount point /home/user42. Not very much done because it does not seem to be very effective.
More often one could feel the need to create a separate file system for e.g. the music of a certain user (that has a lot of music files and threatens to fill up the space in /home) mount point then e.g. /home/user42/Music.
And so on.
For each of those file systems one has to decide where to put it (on a whole mass-storage device, on a partition of a mass-storage device, on e Logical Volume of LVM, on …) and in the end of course where that container is placed hardware wise (revolving disk, solid state storage, …)
And for each file system one has to decide what the file system type is to be (Btrfs, XFS, Ext4, …).
It requires some understanding about basic Unx/Linux concepts (the one and only directry tree and how it is build using mounted file systems, the multi-user and multi-session capability, file ownership and permissions come to mind) and even then after some years a system manager can come to the conclusion that he in hindsight did not implement the best scheme.
“Typical” says nothing about your workload and I think that you refer to /home/<username> and possibly repeating that for all the <usernames> involved.
What I see here in what is a “typical” install for me:
~/VirtualBox VMscan be anything from 10 GB to xxxTB ;
~/.cache some 5GB for the backup app I use, browsers/email clients some 1GB each, thumbnails 0.5GB, everything else some 2GB;
~/.config some 1GB half of which for VirtualBox;
~/bin really depends on what you do (some 1GB here, but no dev work);
~/mozilla some 300MB per active profile;
~/.localsome apps store stuff here, relevance depends on your usage.
There might be other apps that store their stuff in specific subdirs, have a look at your current ~/
As to the filesystem you can use the same criteria you are currently using for /home (everything on ext4 here).
Oh, I wouldn’t have expected that so much is needed for app settings.
(My guess was abt. 2GB).
At my quite new Leap 15.6 (abt. 9GB for /. Only few applications: Firefox etc.)
my home directory doesn’t take more than 1GB for app settings/ caches.
So it seems reasonable to have 10GB min. for that?
When I think at the party that will be going on all the time at that partition,
at the SSD, I probably add some air for SSD management to distribute access.
20GB for a home partition is faaaaar to little. Instead of taking some complicated approach like yours, which will for sure fail in the long run, make it simple.
On a 1TB SSD, 150GB for / and rest for /home
On a 500MB SSD, 150GB for / and rest for /home
That is how i do it on my machines. As there are many VMs stored in /home, it grows fast. All data (Steam games, videos, music.) is on a seperate SSD/HDD.
For web / office, one user profile, no VBox or backup app even 2-3 GB might be enough, 5-10 being more reasonable.
Maybe, the question is does that apply to your use case? XFS was once a default for openSUSE, maybe that was the origin of the recommendation? Does that still apply?
Note that snapper stores on / if using BTRFS with snapper (for roll back) ) so root needs min 40-50 gig. Note also default location for home is on root unless you use a mounted partition for it
… I will do that, and take XFS (hoping it fits best for the access pattern of app setting data etc. on a SSD).
Thank you for your support.
Hopefully there will be a prominent remark in the installation instruction to put home onto a SSD if possible; and link to large personal data from there.
So newbees like me (and for whom else are the instruction) don’t fall into that pithole
like I did. That that fact is often written in the net does not suffice.
(At least I’ve to admit that I haven’t read most of the internet just so… )
Moreover I hope this thread is useful for other newbees, as I haven’t found an
answer to this special question elsewhere before. (I wonder why…)
)