Installing Fedora 34 without a home partition (but a home folder instead)

Ask Fedora
1

Sometimes I need most of my disk space in the root partition and sometimes I need it in my home partition. So the logical conclusion for me is that I need a combined partition. I don’t make use of any of the benefits that a home partition provides anyway.

But to my surprise the installer doesn’t appear to allow doing that.

I would like:

  • 1 “/swap” partition (32Gib, encrypted)
  • 1 “/boot” partition (1Gib, encrypted if possible?)
  • 1 “/boot/efi” partition (600Mib, encrypted if possible?)
  • 1 “/” partition (the remaining ~450Gib, encrypted, btrfs)

(and the “/” partition should then simply have a /home directory)

The weird thing is that once I remove the /home partition in the installer, there is no option to increase the size of “/” accordingly. Am I doing something wrong?

Another weird thing is that I can enable encryption for /boot and /boot/efi, but it automatically resets itself when I select a different partition. Can these partitions even be encrypted?

00c3314b9616f71bec1705b8177045a5348db581.jpeg
00c3314b9616f71bec1705b8177045a5348db581.jpeg1600×840 123 KB

2

The last time I have used that screen, I just clicked Desired Capacity field and type a bigger number than available space (like 999) and it took up all available free space. Can you do that? For encyption, you cannot encrypt the efi partition as far as I know. GRUB supports booting from an encrypted /boot but I have never done that.

3

No, the Desired Capacity field is grayed out. I cannot change the value. Is that a bug?

Are there any disadvantages to encrypting the efi partition? But I guess it doesn’t matter since the installer resets the encrypt checkbox anyway.

1 Like
4

Sometimes I need most of my disk space in the root partition and sometimes I need it in my home partition. So the logical conclusion for me is that I need a combined partition.

Good news! With btrfs, the default is to make /home a subvolume, which means it shares the same storage. No more having 25GB free in / and nothing on /home, or vice versa. I think that may actually be what you’re seeing with the size values here.

You can just leave it, with no separate /home volume, but you might want to have it after all, because that lets you do separate snapshots and backups, set parameters differently, and so on.

4 Likes
5

Thank you, that’s awesome! I wasn’t aware of that!

Should I make all my partitions Btrfs? Or would that be a bad idea?

swap, boot and efi by default use Standard Partition instead of btrfs. I’m not sure what that means.

6

They’re traditional partitions rather than subvolumes. EFI has to be VFAT by the standard, and swap partitions use their own format. (You can use a file instead of a partition, but that has some drawbacks.) And I don’t remember the details but I think we keep /boot as ext4 because of some grub2/bootloader issues.

2 Likes
7

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.