Long time, no talk. How is everyone?

So after watching "Spatry's 5 Favourite Linux Distributions for Beginners" and "Linux Does What Win Don't Part 3" (specifically #10: Share Home with multiple distributions), I am considering wiping the 1.5 TB drive that Ubuntu is now on is on and throwing all 5 flavors that are spoken of (Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, LinuxLite & Manjaro) onto it to give me variety. I am in the process of copying everything over to an external, and even going so far as to put down the urls I was at so I can pick up where I left off with my web surfing on Ubuntu.

My question, however, is: How large I should make the Root partitions (and, now that I think about it, the swap partition. I normally do 30 GB. Should I shrink that?) for each of the 5 distributions? Is there a recommended size for each distribution, especially Manjaro? I'd really like to hold onto somewhere between 800 GB to 1 TB for Home, but if making this work means cutting down I'll bite.

Getting this answered will really help in putting this whole thing together. Thanks everyone. I look forward to the adventures I will have in exploring these distributions.

EDIT: if this isn't in the correct location, please direct me to the appropriate forum. I haven't been here in about 2 years. 0_0

Actually I think this should be in Linux General.

I use 10 GB for a binary distro, 20 GB for a source-based one. But I'm a minimalist and don't install a big desktop or a lot of multimedia software.

30 gig for swap sounds ungodly excessive. Swap is usually twice RAM, and if you have a lot of RAM, you can reduce swap. So on 1 machine I have 16 gig of RAM, don't use it all, and have 4 gig of swap, which is ample.

As for your / partitions, what are you doing for the rest of your set up? Is /tmp and other things simply going into /, so that your set up is /, /home, and swap? with /home and swap being common and / changing per boot choice?

I would think 100 gig for each distro would be ample, but you might have to clear out dead files now and again.

But 30 gig for swap? No way, unless you're doing severely heavy programs.

I tend to put a fair amount of stuff onto my computer, though I suppose I could divide objectives between each OS and have programs on one but not all the others. Have each OS serve a certain purpose...



This guy has 8 gigs of RAM, but since I do gaming I figured a decent size swap was smart. When all is done, do you think 20 gigs would be sufficient.

It is indeed going to be /, /home and swap with swap and /home being tapped by all the distros.

100 gigs seems sufficient. I may make it larger depending on what I plan to do with said distribution, but at least I now have a starting point.


Thanks to the both of you.

Don't use $HOME for that common partition. You want to keep $HOME for your configuration files, especially if you have different software on each distro. Mount the "My Documents" partition somewhere else. I mount mine on /home/data.