Hi there,

I am dual booting windows and Linux on a ThinkPad which has 16G SSD on board, I am thinking about speeding up Linux without investing on a large SSD, this is short term solution as the price of SSD is dropping, so I will eventually replace the HD with SSD, also due to reinstalling windows is much more time consuming than fresh install of Linux, so I want to make things simple for the moment.

Now, I planned to install Debian on the 16G SSD and mount as root, then I repartition the HD make room for the Home and Swap, since I've 16G memory on board I believe I still can gain some speed without swapping too much. Now my questions are, is 16G enough for an average Desktop Linux system w/o Home and Swap ? should I mount the tmp on HD as well ? what about the system update and user applications ? I believe user applications are reside on the Home but not sure about the system update and installed package...etc., any comment ?

Have a look at you current system - "man du".
Easy enough to work out what is extravagant, and what can be deleted/relocated. FWIW I always used to use 15G partition, but have recently had to resize up to 20G as my standard root partition.
But I don't do Debian - your own system is your best guide.

16GB is plenty of space for a Debian install. A default XFCE4 suite will comfortably fit on an 8GB drive. I would recommend you just create one partition for the full 16GB for "/", and you can optionally create a swapfile later (I usually place it in /var, but it can be put anywhere).

With 16GB of RAM, you could try out my RAMBOOT technique for really fast speed! But either way, here's a nice list of some things you can put in RAM rather than the SSD:

(These are taken from my /etc/fstab on a RAMBOOT Debian install.)

Here's my RAMBOOT with rsync synchronization how-to:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ization-37498/

BTW, Debian user applications reside in the root OS partition (in /usr/bin), not /home. However, there are various sorts of ways for a regular user to install non-Debian applications in their own home folder (within /home).

Thanks for the tips, I did what I said and install root on the SSD, for some reason Gparted does not allow me to resize the old Home to make use of the whole HD, so I've to do it from scratch, and all worked as expected, now the system takes less than half the time to load ! I will check out the RAMBOOT thing, it sounds like what Puppy is using.

"16G enough for an average Desktop Linux system"

I would say it is the minimal. You should be able to make it work.

You have to boot to some media and use gparted. I assume your system is locking areas because the drive is mounted. Could be other reasons you can't manage space. Generally no room.

I installed Cinnamon Desktop with base applications, including Liberoffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, also installed Chrome, VLC, Wine, Gwenivew, Teamviewer, SCIM and some chinese fonts, also installed some audio and video editor, ripper...etc., all that take up less than half of the space excluding /home and /swap, that's good enough for me and still have room to grow, Linux applications are far more efficient than windows one, take up much less space and work equally well or better !

I was stupid enough not knowing the SSD can be used in any way, I thought it was reserved for system use never touched it ha !



The /home reside on the HD take up near 200G of space most of them are photo and video, so a 256G SSD is minimum for me without windows.

They run about $140 or so.