OK when I built my system a few years ago and was installing Linux I divide my SSD into serprate partitions, ~60GB for / and the rest for /home. Now I'm wondering if I went overboard having that much space for /. Did I?

That highly depends on your needs (and on other partitions). For example I have a separate /var and /tmp therefore 20 GB is more than enough for /.

Mine is usually around about 5Gb, but I don't install a lot of programs.
Edit: Usually 2~3Gb is used.

There's no real answer to that question. Through time and usage only you can determine the right size for your needs.

My root partition is 35G and it never reach to that size over the years. It is currently using only 9.75GB of the 35G.

If you're concern about space and you want to make the most of your space, you can see up your SSD as a LVM. With LVM, you can adjust the size of the partitions where needed. You can also do snapshots for backups and system restores.

I have two 960GB SSDs. The second one has my Steam games on it. I'm not worried about running out of disk space anytime soon. I was just wondering since most Linux programs don't require a lot space, if I went overboard.

I understand. But to answer your question, most people will use a smaller size partition for root since most of the system files and programs are not that large. Also, some people will even make the root / partition as low as 5GB if they separate /boot, /usr, /opt, /var, /tmp, and /home into there own partitions.

not really needed in the last 10-15 years

drives WERE small in 2000

there is really NO need to have the major problems and hassle of separating " / "

/boot -- 200 meg ( fedora preupgrade needed 1 to 1.5 Gig )
/ ? 20 to 80 Gig
/home 100+ gig
SWAP 4 gig

I have 16 gigs of memory, do I really need SWAP?

Well, I don't as swap is never used. The command free -m always shows zero swap usage on my system which has 8GB of ram.

However, on laptops swap is important for proper hibernation or sleep.

Even on my laptops with 16 GB ram, I do like to have a swap partition equal in size to the amount of ram. As dividvNY said, it helps with hibernation, which on this particular laptop (laptop 4 in my signature), hibernate is used quite extensively since it's an SSD, there's no reason not to use hibernate instead of sleep.

I recently had a Slackware system on which I had allocated 20GB for / (everything else was /home) almost run out of space on /. I had installed many programs on that computer as it started with Slackware 13.37 and ran --Current up through about a month ago.

I erased and reinstalled and allocated 25GB for /.

Frankly, my advice would be that, if your system is working for you, don't worry about having a / that may be larger than optimal, but, if you ever reinstall, perhaps allocate less space to /. In other words, don't worry about it unless you have to.

As for swap, since hibernate is a feature I don't use, ever, if I have 4GB of RAM or more, I have adopted a rule of thumb that swap = 1/2 x RAM.

I have 10 GB for root, and it's half empty. But you do need more if you use a rolling release distro, I've read: Arch recommends 15-20 GB.

i used to put /home on a separate partition but found i either needed more space on /home or more space on /. Any which way i eventually experienced saying to myself... i wish i didn't format it with those sizes.
so now i just have my less than 200mb boot partition and the rest of the disk is / containing everything. i never really saw a good reason or made use of having a separate partition for /home or any other folder.

On my desktop I take half my 62GB SSD (60 GB) for my / file systems and the rest are on other drives. I've had my / up to 23GB by downloading and compiling my own kernel but thats about my limit. I have a swap file of 64GB (twice RAM), on a spinny disk otherwise used for media, in case hibernate ever works on Linux or I want to check out the latest web site known to flood memory.

It completely depends on your usage. I have systems with used space on / (includes everything but /home) ranging from 2.5 GB to 32 GB. You should not go above 75 usage, especially with an SSD, which means the / partition would need to be 4-43 GB for those systems. As you can see, there's a very wide range, which depends on your usage.

60 GB is likely overkill if you have /home on its own partition, but depending on what you do with the system it might not be that overkill. For example, I do a lot of embedded work, sometimes with FPGA/CPLDs. The Xilinx ISE for their FPGAs installs in /opt and is 18 GB alone. Add a few more cross compilers, programs, etc. and you can quickly hit 30-40 GB.

Most of my systems use around 20-25 GB on /, FYI.