I've a 2TB hard drive no dual boot. Entire disk for Ubunu.

I'm doing a fresh install and am wondering the recommended partition sizes.

In the past I simply split the hard drive giving 1Tb to / (root) and 2Gb to swap and the remaining to /home which is 998Gb

I've noticed that my root partition stays rather empty as my /home slowly fills up.

That being said can someone recomend partition sizes for the following.

Total 2TB for the following partitions:

/ (root)
/home
I'll keep Swap at 2Gb.

My root (/) is just 30G. But still its used only 24% (6.5G). Now that i saw this, i'll reduce it to probably 15G. That's more than enough.

Other than /boot, I use LVM for swap, /, /var and /home. I find LVM very flexibly in size management as and when i require.

I usually don't split root and home on desktop systems anymore. I don't like to have wasted space in my root partition.
I generally allocate it like this:

512mb for boot: This is quite a lot for most people, but I recompile my kernel a lot and save everything 128mb should be fine unless you use a fat bootloader like grub.

6GB for swap: Even performing gigantic iterative calculation in matlab, I rarely use up my 4gb of ram and get in to my swap space. However, I like to be able to hibernate my system which requires swap space. In my case 4gb was too small. 6gb worked just fine.

Thats pretty much it. If you really want to separate your home partition on a system you aren't sure how much root is going to occupy, you can always do this:

-Install the system without splitting home and root, make your root partition your last partition on the drive.
-Install everything you want to run on your system. There may be more in the future but the majority will probably be installed
initially.
-Use parted or gparted to shrink the partition. Give yourself a small buffer, maybe 5 - 10 gb, for future software.
-create another partition out of the free space.
-move everything in your home directory to this partition.
-update /etc/fstab to mount the partition at mount point /home
-reboot

I'd set root to about 30GB or so, in case you want to install a few desktop environments and the like. I'm currently using around 20GB of my 30GB root partition on my desktop due to installing a large amount of software.
On my EEE PC I'm only using just over 5GB of my root partition but that's a very frugal install of Debian using XFCE and even has the office suite removed to save space.

I commonly set my root partition, including all subjectories except /home, to 15 GB.

I have not yet encountered a problem with that configuration. Root seems to have plenty of breathing room.

Based on my experience, for a computer that you are likely to install a lot of programs on, 10GB for for everything but /home is cutting it close.

Perhaps the size of your root partition depends on if you include the /usr dir on that partition?

Fred.

I have root or / at size of 4GB, /home 8GB, /usr 8GB all on different SSDs (16 ones I bought for peanuts), it makes things FAST.

I also have /mnt/LData (local data) for storage with /home/andre/Downloads and /home/andre/Documents, symlinked to /mnt/LData/Downloads, and /mnt/LData/Document, etc

I run SuSE13.1 and my system partitions are all at low percentages (/usr is biggest at 44%) if you like installing a lot of additional software make /usr bigger. It is where your applications, X and libraries live....

regards
Andre

I can't be the only one for whom the root partition easily grows beyond 15GB?
don't get me wrong, I know you can have a full install in around 9GB but my Debian install always goes above 15GB once I've installed XFCE, Gnome, KDE and a few others.

I have one separate partition (30GB) for only trying out different OS. Once, I had 2 OS and one of them had Gnome 2 and another had Gnome 3. And I used a common home partition. This messed up lots of my settings. So, In case you wanted to try something like this, you may have to think about not sharing the home partition.

* Think about whether you are going to install any 3rd party software?
* What kind of data you are going to keep (personal/official/entertainment....)
* Are you planning for any VMs?
* Will you be sharing data/content with others?
* If you are working on any java projects and using maven to build, the dependencies will be downloaded to home folder. (May be you can create links or "may be" configure maven to use some other place as repository.. But have a plan in place.)
+ swap (Good practice to have 1.5 to 2 times of your RAM)
+ root

May be I might have missed somethings. But this might help you organize your data.

16GB for /root is plenty, 2GB for swap is enough too, the rest for /home

If your root partition is getting full keep on eye on directories /usr and /var. These directories tent to grow because junk accumulates there.

Good luck to you

Indeed, most of my space is used in /usr/lib and /usr/share. My point is that you can't remove anything in there in a package-managed system to trim the excess so when you have a few DEs, window managers and themes as well as multilib you can easily get over 15GB -- there's nothing unorthodox about my install, I just happen to have a lot installed. So, with 1TB to play with I'd recommend giving over at least 20GB to the root partition for "future expansion" if nothing else.
I concur with the point made above about sharing home partitions though -- I now have a small home drive for each OS when I'm dual booting and mount some data drives in them for things like VirtualBox and my music and video collections.

OP didn't say dualboot was desired here. But I find the best way to dual or triple boot is by sharing /home and swap among all distros but create different user for each distribution and also different password. I even use different format for each /root partition

I partition
/ (root) 10GB (currently using about 3.5GB)
SWAP 2GB
/home the rest

If you are anywhere near using a full 10GB for / you have way more than most people will ever use in a Linux system

I'm with 273, if you've got 2TB to play with then you can afford to over allocate.
My starting point is:
/ 16GB
/var 16GB
/home whatever
/tmp on tmpfs.

My / is currently ~36% used. (Slackware 14.1, with xfce, no kde)

On my build box, I add a separate /usr/src as that can get quite big.