Hello everyone.
After reviewing and testing, I want to do a clean install on my home laptop. 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA 3060
Partitions
/boot/efi - 1 GB vfat
/ - 105 GB btrfs
/home - 122 GB xfs
/swap - 16 GB swap
Will this be okay?
Or is swap not needed?
In Fedora Gnome, the fans are inaudible, but in openSUSE TW, they often turn on and make noise.
And another question: how and with what can I back up KDE (all settings, Kmail, etc.)? I have a separate USB drive for backups.
Merci.
Hi, why do you plan using btrfs on one partition and xfs on the other (just for my curiosity)?
You’ll need swap if you want to use the S4 (suspend to disk aka hibernate) power state.
I am using dd for mirroring the complete SSD to an external USB drive. Auto mounters disabled, of course.
I didn’t notice this till now, but then I am not a Gnome fan, so …
During a period in history this was the default suggestion of the installation process. Maybe the OP likes it.
@M43K8M You need to disable secure boot if wanting to hibernate…
grub-efi+no secure boot, I see;
Info:
Memory: total: 64 GiB note: est. available: 62.69 GiB used: 5.74 GiB (9.2%)
Processes: 591 Power: uptime: 19h 33m states: freeze,mem,disk suspend: deep
avail: s2idle wakeups: 0 ***hibernate: platform*** avail: shutdown, reboot,
suspend, test_resume image: 25.06 GiB services: gsd-power,
power-profiles-daemon, upowerd Init: systemd v: 258 default: multi-user
tool: systemctl
grub-bls+secure boot, I see;
Info:
Memory: total: 32 GiB note: est. available: 30.73 GiB used: 1.66 GiB (5.4%)
Processes: 287 Power: uptime: 0h 0m states: freeze,mem suspend: deep
avail: s2idle wakeups: 0 ***hibernate: disabled*** image: 12.28 GiB
services: gsd-power, power-profiles-daemon, upowerd Init: systemd v: 258
default: graphical tool: systemctl
Which file system is best to use for the home partition?
This depends somewhat from whom you ask, I think. Far from being a file system expert myself, I use ext4 (and ext3, ext2 in earlier decades) and didn’t have any data loss in all those years.
Since ~10 years, I’ve used EFI on FAT32, / on btrfs, no swap (always 16+ GB RAM).
knurpht@Lenovo-P16:~> lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 465,8G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 465,7G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 29,8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 6,5M 0 part
└─sdb2 8:18 0 4,3G 0 part
nvme0n1 259:0 0 953,9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 951,4G 0 part /root
│ /home
│ /var
│ /opt
│ /usr/local
│ /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi
│ /boot/grub2/i386-pc
│ /srv
│ /.snapshots
│ /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 2G 0 part <==never mounted, intended for systemd-boot
So no /home on whatever fs. A separate partition for /home is not a backup, nor does it provide extra safety. These days most distros provide online upgrades, no need of an install medium. And in all cases not having a backup of “/home/*” is stupid.. I never lost my data, but I have had customers who did not backup since they had /home on a separate partition/fs that did. Not funny if you only get 75% of your precious stuff back at € 45 / GB from a 60 GB partition after even photorec could not recover > 10%.
Another thing: If a disk actually fails, it affects the entire disk. Crashes don’t care about partitions.
Another thing: If a disk actually fails, it affects the entire disk. Crashes don’t care about partitions.
This is why I mirror the whole SSD to one external USB drive (trivially simple OS recovery) and backup all relevant data of /home to another.
A separate partition for /home is not a backup, nor does it provide extra safety.
Here I disagree somewhat. /home not being affected by file system failure of the root partition is kind of extra safety IMO.
Different users/admins have different use cases/requirements/likings.
/home on a separate partition/disk is an old but still usefull standard/recommendation.
Longtime users of Linux based OS‘s know, that after several years of continuos updates/upgrades a fresh installation might be required (the reasons don‘t need to be explained here but might if somebody requires explanations).
In the above described case, a separate /home speeds up the setup of the machine massivly. Only format / and still keep all data including your VM images/settings/configs/tweaks from /home.
This saves alot of headache when setting up / new.
Data disks for sure need a solid backup concept. For my usecase, data is stored on a separate SSD/HDD in a physical machine. This data is synched to other physical machines with separate data SSD/HDD. So if one disk fails or the complete computer burns down, other physical systems still have the data.
Some users prefer btrfs with only one partition. Other users prefer ext4/xfs with separate partitions.
There is not a single solution which fits all.
Or maybe you want try another system, including another version of openSUSE.
I used xfs for a long time. Is nice when there are a lot of big files (teoric) and good. You can’t reduce it if you need the space.
ext4 works fine. Maybe is not the best in some things, but is great in most.
btrfs without snapshots is fine, but the best of btrfs are the snapshots. You can use them, or use it withou snapshots.
It’s mainly a matter of taste.
Have fun!
Better change that to 4 GB. Whenever you change to another bootloader like grub-bls or systemd-boot typically more space is needed, see for instance:
Or is swap not needed?
How much memory do you have? What kind of applications do you run?
You could consider zswap instead of swap, for my own desktop I decided to get enough second hand memory so I do not run out of memory unless some strange is going on.
Thanks everyone for the advice.
I left my home folder as XFS.
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