It's a good practice to have the home folder on a separate partition, so it doesn't get overwritten on a reinstall
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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You don't even need that. I have switched between several distros and always kept the same filesystem and just deleted everything but the /home folder. No problems. Every installer supported that.
Partitioning in Linux is something I just don't get, especially in combination with encryption. Every guide says something different about what partitions you need, what names and filesystems you should go with, etc. or are outdated and not accurate to the actual installation & partition managers. And on top of that I just never know how much space I should reserve for the system & home partitions either.
The problem is this isn’t the same for every distro and sometimes different versions of the same distro. Also sometimes you have multiple options to do the same thing. There isn’t really a definitive answer, so one would need to know your situation to answer this
Linux has good bones, just needs more polishing and support sometimes.
It's the year of the Linux desktop!
If you like this, you may be interested in https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
I'm not a Fedora fan, but this is what Bazzite (desktop Steam Deck like OS) is based on. It's almost like source control, where any updates you make are on top of the base image, and when you update, it just rebases your changes over to of the new base image (simplified).
Beyond that, take a look at what many people do called dotfiles. This is where you symlink common home directory files ans folders like .config/etc to a git repo, so not only is it easy to restore any Linux OS settings for apps, you also get version history.
Ok, sounds good.*but do I have to write manual commit logs whenever a config file changes? Feels like a hassle to track down and understand all the specifics. For instance when are app updates to new version with new features and that is reflected in new config files. I currently use freefilesync for backups and keep up to 5 version of old files.
~~Nope. You use it like a normal system. It handles that.~~
You mean in dotfiles. Yes. But I typically just commit from my main machine just before I'm setting up a new one.
A decade or so ago, I messed around with Linux on my laptop, it was my main computer and I was distro hopping yo see what was out there.
I had my /home on a different partition and it worked well, until I left a USB hard drive plugged in....
It was my main music drive and I accidentaly picked that one to be erased...
I lost 6000+ songs....
I know the feel, many years ago I chose the wrong folder and overwrote all my video recordings.
Thing is: it was the backup that I accidentally overwrote.
If it was your only copy, then it wasn't a backup.