Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
On my PC and all my home servers I keep my root partition at 10GB and haven’t had any issues (although I keep everything that isn’t hardware related or a system utility in home).
On my PC I crammed arch, all of KDE (+extra KDE utilities), and some other system stuff like LACT and distrobox in the 10GB root partition and run almost everything else as a flatpak installed to home.
On my servers I do the same thing but all my services are in podman containers in /opt.
Having all the software needed to make the machine work be isolated from my custom home junk makes me feel better, and I like that I can mount root as read-only to make it immutable
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don’t lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.
I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.
But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.
EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.
Separate /home is such a scam. Never have I run out of home space, but boy is 27GB not enough for a root partition that runs any kind of service.
Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD
On my PC and all my home servers I keep my root partition at 10GB and haven’t had any issues (although I keep everything that isn’t hardware related or a system utility in home).
On my PC I crammed arch, all of KDE (+extra KDE utilities), and some other system stuff like LACT and distrobox in the 10GB root partition and run almost everything else as a flatpak installed to home.
On my servers I do the same thing but all my services are in podman containers in /opt.
Having all the software needed to make the machine work be isolated from my custom home junk makes me feel better, and I like that I can mount root as read-only to make it immutable
/ size becomes an issue when you install games via pacman
symlink the directories to somewhere on another partition
Probably my installed games alone are larger than that
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don’t lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.
It’s the opposite for me.
I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.
But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.
EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.