Home partition

English Install/Boot/Login
1

It’s been a while since I’ve done a clean install of openSUSE - as I’ve just done upgrades (at least since Leap) - and my laptop has always been dual boot with windows.

However, it’s been ages (more than a year) since I’ve even booted in to windows so I decided to get rid of it and hand my whole laptop over to openSUSE. At the same time I decided to go for a complete clean install and give Tumbleweed a look.

I was kind of surprised to see during the install that the proposed partition setup was for a BTRFS partition and a swap partition.
No separate Home partition was proposed.

I’ve gone ahead and edited the proposal to include a Home partition but was wondering - is a separate Home partition no longer the recommended way to go? And if it still is the recommended way - why is one not being proposed from the installer?

2

I do not like this change. However, you can use “Guided setup” to specify a separate “/home” partition, so it isn’t too hard to get back to that.

I guess it is a matter of preference. Some distros suggest a separate “/home” and some don’t. Some people prefer one large partition, because then you won’t run into problems of running out of space on one partition while there is lots in another.

If you always upgrade, instead of doing a clean install, then I suppose it doesn’t much matter. My practice has always been to do a clean install, while preserving “/home”.

I did experiment with “/home” as part of root during the Leap 15.1 Beta test period. I was wondering what would happen with a reinstall. Since “/home” is a subvolume, would it be preserved. But, alas, no it was not preserved.

3

Some good advice
I too use a /home and don’t plan any change
Incidentally I also still employ a setup with not btrfs and no snaps, still preferring straight ext4 on / and /home. Never any problems.

4

Even more so as there is zero explanation or justification (or at least reference to bugzilla etc) for this change. It just came out of blue sky:

commit e99875a875b0560ba5fe12a5168aed854d3d1226
Author: Richard Brown <rbrownccb@opensuse.org>
Date:   Fri Nov 16 16:05:56 2018 +0100


    Improve default partitioning & Enable sshd by default


diff --git a/control/control.openSUSE.xml b/control/control.openSUSE.xml
index 534c389..78a3c80 100644
--- a/control/control.openSUSE.xml
+++ b/control/control.openSUSE.xml
...
@@ -269,18 +269,18 @@ textdomain="control"
                 </subvolumes>
             </volume>
 
-            <!-- separate /home: 7 GiB - unlimited -->
+            <!-- separate /home: 10 GiB - unlimited -->
             <volume>
                 <mount_point>/home</mount_point>
                 <fs_type>xfs</fs_type>
 
+                <proposed config:type="boolean">false</proposed>

“proposed == false” disables it by default.

5

Me too and also no problems.