I’m thinking of switching from Ubuntu to Tumbleweed. During the Tumbleweed install process, is it possible to put /home in a separate partition?
Absolutely, yes !
That’s how I configure all my machines.
AAMOF, the /home can be a different filesystem type, which I have.
So, / is BTRFS , and my /home is XFS.
Overall, it is beneficial to have a separate /home, in case of filesystem failure in /.
It’s also more convenient for backing up /home. For example, I boot up system#1 and mount /home for system#2, then back it up.
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It is possible. However Fedora folks say:
“The current partitioning layout - separate file systems for /home and / with no space sharing between them - is problematic. Depending on the amount of physical storage the user is willing to allocate to Fedora, the competition for free space between /home and / increasingly leads to one of them running out of free space.”
More:
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/152
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/153
Having separate partitions is an unforced mistake. Wasted a lot of time with repartitioning. Switching to a single btrfs partition stopped that annoyance:
erlangen:~ # fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: F5B232D0-7A67-461D-8E7D-B86A5B4C6C10
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 1050623 1048576 512M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 1050624 3907028991 3905978368 1.8T Linux filesystem
erlangen:~ #
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Real life requirements and experiences show advantages of a separate home partition. If you have basic skills in setting up a computer you don‘t need to resize your home partition as long as your box physically exists.
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To answer the question in the Title: yes.
This topic is debated often. Anyway, I also use a separate /home on my machines. The pros, for me, far outweigh the cons.
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As you see, you do not only get an answer to your pure technical question (yes, it is possible to create many partitions on the same or different disks, each for their own file system or swap, or other usage, and yes, you can thus have a separate home file system on partition or on a logical volume with RAID or …, or have a separate file system for each home directory of each of your users, etc., etc.)
But you also get unasked advice about having a separate /home or not. But please, take your own needs into consideration and act correspondingly.
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Yes you can, and even better if you put /home on a different drive.
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Yes, you can accomplish this through the Expert Partition support when setting up your installation through the gui design. You just need to make sure that you put your boot/essentials under one drive location while then assigning your /home to another location. This took me a few tries because I wasn’t able to find some documentation on this. Though, I did a few boots and was able to accomplish this.
To be aware, I did this for a fresh OS install which has an nvme (for boot speed benefits) and SSD for larger storage needs for my games and other hosted local materials.
As an example, please see details of my system below:
name@name:~> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 4.0M 0 4.0M 0% /dev
tmpfs 7.8G 0 7.8G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 3.1G 1.9M 3.1G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /.snapshots
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /boot/grub2/i386-pc
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi
tmpfs 7.8G 8.0K 7.8G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 1.9T 4.8G 1.9T 1% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /opt
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /usr/local
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /srv
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /root
/dev/nvme0n1p2 464G 12G 451G 3% /var
/dev/nvme0n1p1 511M 9.5M 502M 2% /boot/efi
tmpfs 1.6G 64K 1.6G 1% /run/user/1000
name@name:~> lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
**sda **
└─sda1 btrfs XXXXXXX 1.8T 0% /home
sdb
└─sdb1 exfat 1.0 Backup Plus XXX
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 XXX 501.6M 2% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 btrfs XXXX 450.7G 2% /var
│ /root
│ /srv
│ /usr/local
│ /opt
│ /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi
│ /boot/grub2/i386-pc
│ /.snapshots
│ /
└─nvme0n1p3 swap 1 XXXXX [SWAP]
name@name:~> cat /etc/*release
NAME=“openSUSE Tumbleweed”
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The original question was already answered.
The interesting question is probably this:
" Can I use one /home partition to be used by several opensuse versions". eg: opensuse 15.5 and tumbleweed. 
Sorry I don’t mean to hijack this thread. This is just for the sake of discussion.
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As the original question was very clear (to me at least), and the OP did not bother to answer to the suggestions, nor did explain that in fact he wanted to achieve something different from the original question, this is rather speculative and will lead to this going more and more off-topic.
This thread will be closed when posters do not stay on-topic.
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When partioning section comes, you can change the partition schema and then press “guided”, and in the dialog box you’ll can check “make /home a separate partition”.
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Well, I don’t completely agree with that. Main reason to separate /home from / is to reuse the partition in any Linus fresh install. And a particular case for this is when user tries a new system without delete the last system. Same user account could fails if there are different versions of the same programs.
Regards.
Real life requirements and experiences show advantages of a separate home partition. If you have basic skills in setting up a computer you don‘t need to resize your home partition as long as your box physically exists.
I’m a newbie. What do you mean by “as long as your box physically exists”?
What are the 2 biggest cons?
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The “unasked advice” is also very helpful for a newbie like me. It provides additional details that help me understand the context.
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When you say “drive location” you mean a partition? Or you mean a separate drive like a separate HDD or separate nvme? Remember, I’m a newb so it’s good to avoid ambiguities.
My plan is to put /home on a separate partition and not a separate drive.
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Sorry for the delay, for some reason I didn’t get replies in my email.
Also, what is the difference between “Watching”, “Tracking” and “Normal”?
The Suse forum preferences uses the word “notification”. Is this an email notification? Or a browser push notifications?
I just turned on Allow Notifications for this website.
I checked and I’ve previously received email reply notifications from this forum. But now I’m not getting email notifications. I don’t now why. Any ideas?
Also, I just found the definitions of Watching, Tracking and Normal. I’m set to Watching this thread, but I’m not getting email notifications of replies.
Hi.
If you set a partition for /home, you need to set a partition for /, and set the sizes for both. When the time passes by, it is possible that one of them may be filled while you have a lot of free space in the other. Even if using btrfs lets you solve this problem easily, this may include: reduce the free partition (and xfs cannot be reduced), create a new partition, add the partition to the filesystem (/ or /home).
/home is useful when change the distro. But even then you should use a different user account. Better usage of disk space comes with / and /home in the same partition.
Regards.
I’d say the #1 reason (my opinion, of course) is that we would mis-calculate the size required for the / partition. What do I mean? Let’s say you decide that 30gb is a sufficient size … and then months later, after installing way more software than you anticipated (which means more low-level software), suddenly, you get system warnings that / is running out of space.
Then you’re going to have to resize the / , and most likely, resize /home a bit smaller because you need to offer the extra space for /
Probably #2 is it might be a newbie that separating /home will be a complex experience.
You can google this … and read on
linux home separate partition pros cons
For example, here’s one: