Partitioning

So I’m ready to make a full move to openSUSE, and I was wondering how I should set up my partitions.

I have 240gb to play with. So should I just do one partition root partition and that’s it?

Or should I have a separate one for usr, home, var boot etc?

If so how big should they all be?
Thanks in advance.

swap 2GB or there about
/ (root) 20-30GB
/home (all the rest) (or split in 2 and make one a store)

11.2 Install Slideshow with Tips - openSUSE Forums

My current setup on my main desktop

/ ------> 15 GB
swap → 1 GB
/home → 96 GB

Depending on your memory specs. You have no need for a swap. I have 4gb so I dont use a swap. And having different partitions for home is too much. I have just a root partition. I see no need for a separate partition for home.

Can you explain (with arguments) why you think that “And having different partitions for home is too much.” and “I see no need for a separate partition for home” would be a good advice to other people?

Many of us (including me) oppose this. It is very, very handy to have a seperate /home partition. You can install a new system without even touching the (your) personal data. See the good advice given by caf4926 and microchip8.

Also Swap may be a bit superfluous having 4gb of memeory, you fail to tell him from which size on Swap will be useless and thus he can not make a decision. Secondly Swap is e.g. needed by suspension to disk and when you do not tell the OP about it, he could be serious in trouble when he did as you advises.

both are bollocks

  1. if you need suspend to disk, you need swap, and depending on how much RAM you have, for s2disk to work correctly, you need a minimum swap space that matches your RAM amount… so if you have 4 GB RAM and want s2disk, you need at least 4 GB swap, preferably a tiny bit more

  2. see post by Henk. Having /home on separate partition is very useful/beneficial

After 6 years with Suse, I now have 5 11.1 installs and one 10.3 (old hardware) under my direct control. From the start I always had a minimum of 3 partitions - swap, root & home. I am now leaning toward a minimum of 4, with the 4th being a /home/data partition. Then make sure all the hidden configuration directories are in /home, and all your data files are in /home/data. Then if you break something and have to repair or re-install, you can replace any corrupt config files. The idea is to not have to back-up and restore all your data. As drives become bigger and users store more large music and video files, this take a long time to do.

Putting every thing in one partition is a dangerous, as if you need to do a clean install, doing a back-up and restore of your data is much harder. Partitions are free, and having a separate /home is always a good idea. It makes it easier to fix a broken install, do upgrades, etc. Even if a system has lots of RAM, I find that with something like GIMP, working with several large files open can slow things down. I now have a 3.4Ghz Xeon workstation, and there is a noticeable difference when I disable swap. With a 4Gb swap partition, there is no lag switching between 3 or more 100Mb plus open image files. And when I work with GIMP & Scribus open at the same time the difference is quite marked.

There are a lot of false myths about swap size, but it seems that if you have space, then having one is good, even if it only gets used occasionally. My recommendation for beginners is always have a swap partition the same size as your RAM, but if you have less then 1Gb RAM, then have at least 1GB swap. Always have root & /home partitions, and if you have the space put the data on a 4th partition as /home/data.

On my workstation Suse 11.1 is on a 250Gb drive partition as 4GB swap, 20Gb root, 20Gb /home, 170Gb /home/data, and 2 x 9Gb partitions for Ubuntu and Fedora as 2nd & 3rd OS’s. I do video editing, so have a separate 250Gb drive which mounts as /home/video.

As the discussing about partitioning and where too mount is very dependant on ones needs and as this also goes ways beyond the simple question of the OP, my question may be more or less of topic. But:
Why do you mount this on /home /video and not on /home/<your-username>/video? It is your data and not of other users of the system (this is valid also when you think you personaly wll only allow not more then one user on the system) and should be reachable easy from where you are at home: your home directory. This can of course also be achieved with a symbolic link from somewhere inside your home-dir, but in that case you could also mount on /video (or anywhere else).

Same of course for your /home/data. Do you provide symbolic links from the users home directories to directories inside /home/data, or how do you care for the users?