Background: Debian/Ubuntu/mint for 15 years but only scratched the surface technically
System: x220 thinkpad, currently mint 19. Custom bios (8det76ww 1.46), 16gb ram, 500gb SSD (sda) /home(ext4), 120gb mpcie SSD (sdb) / ,with swap file (forgot to create swap partition).
Remarks:
Don’t care about sdb wear since only for /
Don’t like snap, flatpak seems ok
Would like to not reformat /home
Use: mainly web, libre office, photo management
Problem: f41 installer makes me nervous despite recent full backup
Questions:
1 do I need /boot or /boot/efi
2 any benefit with btrfs on / ?
3 16gb swap partition or file? (hibernation needed)
4 physically remove /home SSD (sda) then deal with config file mess post installation?
5 will installer safely leave /home while writing new kde config and auto mounting?
TIA
Prospective ship jumper
Edit: sorry misnamed SSDs, old version suggested 2 partitions on one device
Unless your use case will suffer, it is best to stick with the installer defaults. That makes it easier to get help and increases the chances that problems you encounter will be shared with other users.
The custom BIOS could be an issue. I would look for you model in the LHDB to see what issues others have encountered.
Power management in Linux has been making a transition to more universal standards and away from vendor-specific methods. This has resulted in many systems having problems waking from sleep and for some vendors there have been BIOS updates. There have also been efforts to reduce linux boot times, so you may find that hybernation is more hassle than the time savings warrant.
The installer is intended to only uses space you have explicitly made available. I would still make a backup of /home in case things go bad. Physically removing the drive should not be necessary, and could create issues when you add it back. You will end up with a btrfs partition with subvolumes for root and home. There are tools to convert legacy linux filesystems to btrfs and merge btrfs across disks, but probably less risky to just rename the new /home/user create a sybolic link to the old sda user home and rsync the renamed /home/user to the old user home to get the newer metadata, but you will want to check what is being changed (e.g., thinks like shell startup scripts). You can also just use symbolic links to the important directories (e.g., ~/Documents) for access to your existing data.