Partitions and the order of them
 

Good day

I know this sort of thing has been asked many times before and I have read many posts and none seem to say; "This is the right way" so I would assume that there might not be a right way but merely a few preferred ways which will work just fine.

I am talking about which partitions I need to create for a Linux Desktop installation and in which order. The order of partitions sometimes are mentioned because some people say that it helps to put the swap and /boot partition at the beginning of the disk to help with performance, etc. There was also a claim that it is actually faster to put it in the middle of the disk then seeking times will be less.

Also some people mentioned that /var (I might be mistaken) should also be a partition because a DoS/scripting attack might fill up your / (root) if /var is in the same partition as root. Am I correct or misguided?

I was thinking of having the following partitions created for my new installation (in the same order):

swap (8 GB - I have 4 GB RAM which I want to increase. I use a lot of VMs)
/boot (1 GB)
/ (20 GB)
/var (10 GB)
/home (60 GB)

The sizes are what I determined it to be based on my limited knowledge and what I have read so far. Please correct me if I am wrong. I have 320GB available but will be dividing the harddrive between the one Linux installation and two Windows versions.

So my question is; Is the above correct (or more correct than another config). If not, how would you propose I do the partitioning. Also, does it matter if I put the Linux partitions first before the Windows partitions?

Thank you for you help.

Don't bother having seperate boot unless you need it.
Don't reserve space for a home partition unless you have sensitive data there or want to encrypt it or want to run 2 linux distroes
Make a fat partition for swapping files between Linux and Windows!
Use a secure Linux distribution and/or secure your installation, then don't use seperate /var


/ (80gb)
swap (8GB)
fat share (100GB)
windows 1
windows 2


This is not what I would personally use, but then I would also not personally use Windows very often. I would use multiple linux distroes and have a home partition shared between those two which is encrypted. I dont necessarily use swap as I have lots of RAM available. Only a few times have I had a seperate boot, but in particularily on experimental setups.