Not separating out /home means not having to answer the question "what's the maximum amount of space the software you install during the life of this disk will occupy?"

There is no sense in predicting the future. You'd give a reasonable answer given the current situation and make improvements in the future. Your data storage shouldn't be a set-it-and-forget-it solution, anyways.

Yes, there's no point predicting something when it's not necessary to.

This post is in the Newbie forum - the reasonable answer given the current situation for a newbie is to not worry about it when they don't need to.

There's nothing stopping them making changes in future, when they have an idea of the sizes of different areas given their personal usage and can make a more informed choice.



To be clear, I'm not saying there's no benefit to separate filesystems, (I'll personally do it on any machine with space for multiple drives), but it's not a necessity and if a newbie wants to install Linux on a machine with a single small-medium drive, why add unnecessary worry about whether partitions are big enough.

1 members found this post helpful.

As it turns out, I've learned that it is beneficial to separate out the /home partition, to make upgrading easier. i.e. going from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20.x. And under a scheme like that, you get to keep your data, (after the upgrade.) Joe Collins has an entire video on the subject. The only unfortunate thing is his video is 4 years old. So, if you can find a more recent one, feel free to post it.

Why? It is still as good as it was 4 years ago.

2 members found this post helpful.

That's good to hear.

Thanks