Hi
Can anyone tell me if the actual distro you are installing should influence your partitioning scheme? Or is it completely un related and arbitrary?

Unrelated and arbitrary!

Different maintainers have different ideas of what's "normal", so they build different defaults into their installer. It's all arbitrary, do what you like.

I used to have a separate /boot, until I realized that in over a decade I had literally never used it, and it only caused problems when the package manager didn't remove old kernels fast enough and it filled up, so I stopped doing a separate /boot. I also used to have a separate /home, until USB 3.0 SSDs with 500 MB/s transfer rates came out and I realized that if I wanted to re-install my OS, I could back up my entire drive in a few minutes, re-install, then re-load the backup in another few minutes, so why bother with a separate /home? So I stopped using a separate /home. Now I just have two partitions, a small swap just-in-case, and the rest of the drive is /, and it works well for me.

I'd certainly stay with /home, because I backup my data every day.

The Red Hat installer (Anaconda) will give you logical volume management if you let it, which does require /boot (I think), but unless you're setting up a server you should be very firm and refuse!

As do I. You don't need a separate /home partition for that

I just came to the realization that it's a waste of effort (at least for me) to bother with having a separate /home partition when on the rare occasion I need to reinstall (something that might happen once or twice in the computer's entire lifetime) I can just back up the entire drive and then restore /home and whatever else I need in less time than it takes to do the reinstallation itself.

It made sense back when it took a few hours to backup or restore a few hundred gigs, but that's not the case anymore.

Everybody's needs are different though.

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having a seperate /home partition implies that one can use the same partition across different distros.
however this can cause so much trouble (esp. with "modern" desktop environments) that it's almost akin to hosing your system.
my experience, much easier to filter out the files that take up a lot of space (media) and have those on a seperate data partition, and create a few symlinks after each install: