First time installing Linux in a partition along with W7.
This is what I intend to do:
/.......20GB
/boot...512MB
SWAP....8GB (Have 12GB RAM)
/HOME...?

Have used this and others for instructions, which this forum recommends to others: http://itsfoss.com/guide-install-lin...-boot-windows/

Me:
275GB FREE (HDD 465GB)
WINDOWS 7
INTEL CORE I7
RAM 12GB
BIOS Interface

-Will these disc spaces work and how much for "/home"?
-Presently there is only one parition for W7,in my C: drive; it's one line NTFS.
I am a light PC user. A lot of browsing, reading, YouTube videos.

Hi there,

so welcome to Linux and to a new experience. ;-)
Expect some occasional steep slopes along the learning curve, though.

Your partition layout looks quite reasonable indeed. You didn't list the file systems you're going to use, but probably all ext4.

Whether it makes sense to have a separate partition for /boot is controversial. I've always done it like that, but some other people say it's useless - having a /boot directory inside the root filesystem is just as good.

The question is: Which of the two OS's will be the primary one? Which is the one you'll use most of the time? If you intend to move toward Linux gradually, I'd give all the remaining space to /home. OTOH, if you still want to use Windows most of the time and just occasionally fire up Linux, you won't need that much space in /home, and you'll rather want to make another data partition for Windows. Don't forget that Linux can access Windows partitions (NTFS), too.

[X] Doc CPU

If you want to use suspend to disk, the swap partition must be a min. 12GB.
The /boot partition should be ~200MB: the kernel(s) and the bootloader is saved.
The /home patition can be 50GB, 100Gb or more: depends on, what you want to save in your home folder.
A /tmp and a /var partition is recommend to prevent file system fragemtation.
You can also add noatime and relatime to your fstab for all partitions exluding swap.

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This looks fine.
Of course, that's a whole lot less important if you don't really understand what/why you're doing it (eg. following a guide)

/ refers to everything. If you just install to / and be done with it, that is fine. That'll mean you have 20g for everything.
However, having it as a seperate partiton protects against fragmentation. It doesn't fragment as much as windows but over time writes will fragment a drive. Writing to it less (eg. modifying system files & installing/removing programs) causes it to run longer at a faster speed.
This isn't super important right now as a newbie. But later on when you feel more comfortable - it's a choice available.

/boot as a seperate partition is generally only useful under full disk encryption. It permits you to boot without having any other partitons unlocked.

SWAP is one of those funny things that "may be useful" Effectively, it will only come in use if you run out of ram, at 12gb that is unlikely.
After 8 days up, with suspends every night and 30-40 firefox tabs open & several workspaces and programs & video & music I am at 3.1gb (firefox 1.2gb). I would consider that a lot of ram used too. Linux is pretty efficent with ram, and uses pretty much all of it in the best way possible. Read the link to understand.
If you don't know, go with swap & it won't hurt you.

/home is for user files and configuration.
It's where your videos, documents, desktop dir, downloads, personal configuration go. This partiton is used for every user you create.
Now, if no one ever did anything except stream music and go on youtube, you could probably get away with 30mb.
Since you will likely be using the home directory for "stuff", really only you can decide the correct size.
The rest of it? 200gb? Whatever you think is a good amount, go for it. As I understand it, making a filesystem bigger is easier then shrinking it. (not super important right now)

This makes a nice review of the linux filesystem hierarchy.

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As someone who dabbles in linux and is a danger to himself accordingly, I have wrestled with this question before. Your suggested layout looks reasonable, although I would do a few things differently.

I like having about 50 gig for / -- plenty for updates.

Unless you plan on playing with virtual machines (and hold off on that until you are comfortable with linux), 4 gig of /swap should be ample when you have 12 gig of ram. As was mentioned, however, if you want to suspend, you'll need 12 gig of swap. Eight gig of swap is a nonstarter. You can't suspend to disk (too small) and with 12 gig of ram, you'll never use that much swap. Unless, of course, you want to use VM, in which case 12 gig can be justified. I'd start with 2 to 4 gig of /swap and modify later if you need too. /var and /tmp are good ideas, too. They cut down on fragmentation and will leave space elsewhere alone. Mine are 30 gig each, and that's overkill for both. Ten each is adequate. Here's where I insist on parting company with others: Have a separate partition for data. That way backups are easier, and if during an upgrade or whatnot you wipe out your /home partition, your data is safe. Personally, I run about 60 gig for /home, and have an enormous /opt partition for data.

The only thing I insist on is that you get your data onto a separate partition. Save yourself some grief and make your back ups a one stop check.

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Hi there,

granted, but that depends very much on the distro you choose. The better part of my own experience is with Ubuntu, its fork Mint, plus Debian and Gentoo for server systems with no GUI. With all of them, I found that after installing the base system, all appropriate updates and the various additional packages I want to have, hardly more than 5..6GB were occupied. So 20GB seems abundant for me.

... which is what the OP is doing in allocating an extra partition for /home - assuming you use the directories "according to the book", i.e. place all your personal files in your own home directory (or somewhere below it).

I got your point, and we seem to think the same way. I also consider the /home directories as a junkyard for individual configuration files and as a storage for programs that I cannot configure to store their stuff elsewhere. For my actual daily work, I have a separate partition mounted to /data. That way, I need so little space for /home that I don't even bother to put that on a partition of its own.

[X] Doc CPU

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I would be tempted to say not to bother with the /boot partition but that is coming from somebody who has never used one so take it as you will. My reason is that it means one fewer partition to worry about and means that if you don't remove old kernels for whatever reason (your distro doesn't prompt or something) you'll not fill it up.
For / I would be tempted to say 20 ought to be ample. Why? because I'm using just over 15GB for mine and I have a few desktop environments installed and multilib (32 bit support on 64 bit OS) libraries -- I can't think of anything I could install which would put / over 20GB though mine is currently 32GB because it's half my OS SSD and I plan to dual boot only.
/home can be as big as you want so just think about what kind of files you want to use under Linux. Remember you should be able to access your Windows data fine under Linux.
For swap, as mentioned above, if you want to hibernate then you need 12GB and, if not, you're likely OK with 4GB or even less -- though only you can really find out what your workload is.
If you're starting out, you're not planning on creating any data on Linux and you've a fast enough internet connection and/or other places to put data then I would almost be tempted to say install Linux to one partition to begin with (swap aside) just for ease of use and to get a feel of how much space you want for things.