Originally Posted by David the H.

I agree with the other David. A lot of advice out there is based on production use. For home users, simpler is usually better.

There's really no need for a simple laptop to have half-a-dozen different partitions. I've already said that a separate /boot was unnecessary for a desktop, and /var and /tmp don't really need to be separate either--but you do have to ensure that the drive they're located on has enough space to handle occasional large loads. A separate /home however should be almost mandatory.

I intended to mention filesystem use as well in my last posts, but forgot. Again, KISS should be the operating principle. XFS and whatnot may have fractionally better performance in some circumstances, but they come at a cost of being more complex to maintain. Specifically, many of the common low-level access and recovery tools don't work with them. Ext3 is the default because it's reliable and because it has all the tools necessary for maintenance and recovery.

When I installed this current system several years ago, I was still fairly new at this and decided to use reiserfs for all my main drives, because what I read said that it performed "better". I now feel that that was a mistake, as it's limited me in certain ways and hasn't really given me any noticeable benefit. When I set up my second system I went straight ext3. And I'll do the same with this one when the time comes to reinstall it.

But as I said in my last post, this is just my advice. You're free to try out whatever you want.