(Solved)I setup a 20GB /
a 4GB swap
a 320GB /home and a
120GB /usr

anyone forsee any problems?
I used cfisk to partition;
set the type for /home "home" swap "swap"/ "root" and the other two "linux"

No, I don't see a problem. You might not have made best use of the space on your hd, but you could have had your reasons. You don't say what your disk(s), your ram or your applications are. I am presuming private low intensity home use. 4G might be tight for swap if you're loading heavily on small ram.

Would you tell me what you would do with 500GB?
Any others with their thoughts; I'd like to hear and the reasoning
Thanks

For home use, I did this:
Some comments: My swap = my ram = 6G. sda6 had some NTSS (Never The Same System) version of linux (Fedora, I think) that I tired of and removed to upsize SDA7. Anytime I booted it, the NTSS thing wanted to download another gig of bug fixes. It's currently unused. Sda7 houses 2 or three vms, one is vista, one is a linux, and any distro I want to try can go there.

That's small beside your setup, but it's all I need. The junk is in my homedir. I don't have a massive media collection or database, am not a magpie and if I haven't accessed something in a few years, I can purge it. My ssd is 250G.

120GB for /usr seems excessive but I don't know what you plan for it, so maybe it's not. Personally, I wouldn't -- and in fact don't -- bother to have a separate /usr.

Unless you have something specific in mind, a separate /, /home and swap is a good starting point. Just make sure that you make '/' big enough to hold all the other directories that you don't separate out.


You'll most likely evolve your layout as you gain experience and come to understand how you use your linux system. Mine has changed several times over the years.

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It's worth noting that some partitions continually fill, others stay relatively stable once the system is installed.
/usr stays fairly stable except if you're continually compiling stuff.
/var expands, particularly /var/log and massively so on a server.
/home inevitably expands unless you have disk quotas
The various other things in / stay fairly stable on many machines; on others, some (e.g. /opt) fill with piles of stuff. It depends on what you do.

As you can see from the varied posts here, there is no ideal partition scheme. It comes down to what you intend to use the system for. On my htpc with a 256GB SSD, I keep things pretty small. I have a 20GB partition for / and another 20GB for my /home/. Both are under 50% utilization. The remainder of my space is mounted to /share/ and that is where I keep my VM and any temporary video files (they're all stored on a server upstairs, but if I'm going to be doing maintenance on the server, I can copy media locally so things can still be watched -- keeps the family happy when I tinker). Personally, I wouldn't separate out my /usr/ and I don't have a swap (I have 16GB of RAM in it and kodi+KDE never uses more than 1GB, and my main VM has 8GB allocated, so I still have a 7GB buffer).

But my desktop is a different story. I have a Crucial 480GB SSD for my primary drive and I feel cramped with it. I have 8GB for swap (plus another 8GB reserve swap file I can enable if needed), 200GB for /, 50GB for /var/www/ (since I allow uploads, I don't want some jerk to fill my root partition with junk), and the remainder for /home/. I also have 5 additional drives all mounted under /share/ for my media collection (around 19TB with 82% usage). I compile a LOT of software on that machine and I tend to keep the source around, so it can fill up my /tmp/ (if compiling using SlackBuilds), or my ~/program-downloads/ if I'm compiling it manually (usually only for testing). I currently have over 30GB of files in my /usr/ directory and 60GB in my /tmp/. My root partition is around 60% utilized, so if it were to get up much higher, I'd probably have to start clearing things out. My home directory contains a lot of stuff, including steam games (which can take up a large chunk of space, but I want the speed benefits of my SSD). I'm sitting about 80% utilization in there. All media is stored on my regular HDDs under /share/.

On my slackrepo VM, I just have one partition with no swap.

As you can see, depending on your situation, various partition schemes can be utilized. If I was running a more serious server, I'd probably consider putting /var/ and /tmp/ on their own partitions to ensure that some runaway process can't fill them with files and ultimately fill my root partition. However, if it happens, I could handle the downtime it may cause. Some users also keep their /usr/ on a separate partition, however, it seems like this is getting more and more difficult to manage due to upstream not taking those setups into account.

I decided on my Acer Aspire E 15
/20GB
swap 4GB
937GB ext4