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Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI?

And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough RAM that you need to start swapping it to disk, I'd rather just invoke the OOM killer and kill the badly behaved process, instead of slowing my system to a crawl while it tries to access memory at disk speeds.

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There are a few reasons they split off home and root. It makes recovery simpler, and allows you to share the partition between multiple environments - which is useful if you dual boot.

I personally rarely make a second partition for home, but I always make a separate partition for /boot. GRUB requires an separate EFI partition to install (which is kind of dumb), and if you decide to encrypt your disk, the boot directory cannot be encrypted.

I think the reason they put swap in these tutorials is that many times people install linux on low-powered machines that require the swap because of limited memory. It's not a requirement to install linux, though. I never run it on installation.

I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone.

And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.

I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.

Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.

Yeah, what I meant was that I had my /home on / rather than on a separate partition, and managed to install a completely different linux distro anyway without losing it.

OK I misunderstood.

> I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

The classic reason is preventing space / inode exhaustion of / by user accounts and preventing time of check, time of use vulns. Tough the latter have since been addressed in other ways [1]. There's also a certain amount of convenience and cleanliness to separating system and data that way.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security#Preventing_lin...

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