How many of you would use LVM's over standard partitions...just trying to work out which is most popular and useful method

thanks

I use both. Which one I choose depends on the use-case.

I never liked LVM for personal use as it was predicated on always just increasing lvs/vgs - no apparent thought given to reducing/deleting lvs/vgs. Even when LVM2 came out.
It's now more flexible, but seems to have been "tacked on". If ZFS had been available earlier I would have gone that way, but btrfs suits the way I work, and has for years.

At work, it's all LVM.

LVM can help for moving targets. Specially with virtual devices on them they can help a lot while evaluating disk space. Or if there is a sudden burst in db data lvm can help. Also most of things that lvm helps out with can be done with normal partitions also you have to copy a lot of stuff.

Regarding performance lvm takes a tiny bit of it which I just neglect with modern disk.

Also for robustness I normaly leave a boot partition out of lvm just in case my boot loader is not behaving that well.

All in all if I have seperate partitions for different parts of the filesystem I'd use lvm. If all one big pile just basic partitions schema.

Agree with the above, everything is a trade-off. LVM has some nice features, but if something goes wrong there is one more layer that can pose a data recovery problem. I use mostly LVM.