I’m used to Ubuntu-based distros, currently KDE Neon. I’ve been doing some thinking about switching to Fedora, and would like some advice about how to handle my partitions.
Currently, I use an ext4 partition on an SSD mounted at / and another ext4, on an HDD, mounted at /home. There is also a swap, also on the HDD. My main reasons for the separation are limited space on the SSD (not enough for my /home) and also ease of reinstalling without losing my data, by leaving /home unchanged by the installer. (I’ve pretty much kept the same scheme since the 2000s, except for moving / to an SSD.)
From testing in a VM and reading other topics, I’ve seen that Fedora’s standard is a btrfs partition containing everything except /boot, and swap existing only in RAM. Also I’ve read that btrfs’s benefits mainly apply if / and /home are the same partition.
Given this, and that I don’t intend to get a bigger SSD any time soon, if I am to install Fedora over my current system, which of the below options would you suggest is best?
Leave partitions the same, just mount /home and reformat / as ext4
Leave partitions the same, convert /home to btrfs and reformat / as btrfs too
Rejoin / and /home on the HDD (I don’t like that because I expect it would make startup slower), as btrfs
Something else?
As for swap, I need to do more research to understand why it helps to have it in RAM (I was under the impression that it used to be on a disk in case RAM gets full), I’m not asking about it here (not that ideas would be unwelcome).
For the record, I’m also dual-booting Windows 10, all of it on the SSD (not much software installed).
/ and /home use same space as sub-volumes. This means you have not to worrier about the size of each sub-volume because they use the space dynamically. As I was reading, you can reinstall Fedora without touching your /home.
Swap is in ram because it is faster and probably is better for an SSD not having to do many read/write access (I bet this is nowadays with modern ssd less a problem).
Fedora stands out from other distributions precisely because of such new configurations and technologies.
As your intention probably is to move away from windows one day, I would not hesitate to invest in a second SDD or NVME and use it externally till you make the step and then just swap SDD/HD and let the Windows and the Linux world separate on disks. Depending on your hardware I would even use windows as VM on a Fedora based install if you really happy with Linux.
Since 2000 the tech made big moves. I guess it is time to follow them
I think the easiest is to do an automatic/guided (the default) installation to just the SSD.
Post-install, you can change /etc/fstab so that it mounts your existing HDD/ext4 volume to /home instead of the Btrfs subvolume home created by the installer.
I think you’ll find ext4 is more optimized for spinning disks anyway, if performance is a concern. It’s optional to convert to Btrfs, if you think there are features that make it worth while.
