Concept for new installation

[jlittle]

SSD: 256 GB M.2

A puzzling choice in 2025... I used a similar size for many years (it was quite adequate, even with 6 or 7 different installs), for reasons of cost, but these days larger SSDs are much cheaper, and the scarce resource is the M.2 slot.

ext3 /: 64 GB

ext3, not ext4? I wonder why.

As skyfishgoo has pointed out, these days 64 GB for / may be too small. Compared to a few years ago, subsystems like snaps, flatpak and docker can use a lot of space.

Have you considered btrfs? If you want to take backups seriously, and easy recovery from mistakes (f. ex., I deleted /home a few weeks ago) btrfs is good. If you stick to the 256 GB SSD, I recommend btrfs because you don't have to juggle space between / and /home. There's good reasons that a lot of distros, like Fedora, default to btrfs these days.

[skyfishgoo]

how many GB to devote to / vs /home is up to you based on your tendencies to use a lot of different software and how big those files are... a lot of installed software can really balloon your / partition esp if they are GUI applications and or snaps/flatpaks.

my /home tends to be fairly light as i don't keep games or other big projects in there, i put those onto their own dedicated partitions for easy backups.

i would say that for anything in /home that you access frequently, it would be worth having at least a small /home partition for quicker access from the SSD and larger hoards of data can be mounted from the HDD as needed.

[nobbert]

you swap should be RAM + sqrt(RAM) if you plan to ever use hibernate.... just sqrt(RAM) if you don't
so either 72GB or or 8GB depending on your use case.

I'd like to use hibernation, so I'd partition 72 GB of swap - check!

why ext3 and why only 64GB for you system partition? you must not have very much installed, mine is over 70GB (68% of a 100GB partition) and that's on my old machine... the new one has a 200GB system partition (tho it has a 1TB SSD).

So rather ext4 for root as well? And rather just use the rest of the SDD (183 GB) for root?

[skyfishgoo]

you swap should be RAM + sqrt(RAM) if you plan to ever use hibernate.... just sqrt(RAM) if you don't

so either 72GB or or 8GB depending on your use case.

why ext3 and why only 64GB for you system partition? you must not have very much installed, mine is over 70GB (68% of a 100GB partition) and that's on my old machine... the new one has a 200GB system partition (tho it has a 1TB SSD).

i have no opinion on RAID as i've never used it, but seen lost of confusing (conflicting) info on how well it's supported under linux.

[nobbert]

Hello,

I am using Kubuntu since 2007 and have just little precise knowledge, it's mostly just some grains of info here and there, unfortunately...
My plan is to setup up a completely new PC from scratch and I would like to have some advice in order to avoid major mistakes.

Hardware:

• CPU: some AMD, mid price-range
• RAM: 64 GB DDR5
• Mainboard: suitable for above
• SSD: 256 GB M.2
• HDD: 2x 8 TB SATA as Software-RAID1 (brand new), 1x 8 TB as external Backup-Disc (my not-really-old one)

Software:

• OS: Kubuntu 24.04.1 LTS

Partitioning:
1x SSD 256 GB:

• EFI/Boot: 1 GB
• swap: 64 GB
• ext3 /: 64 GB
• ext4 /home: 127 GB

2x HDDs 8 TB as Software-RAID1:

• ext4 /home/RAID: 8 TB

1x HDD 8 TB:

• ext4 (used for backups): 8 TB

Questions:

1. is 64 GB swap enough or should I make it double the RAM-size: 128 GB?
2. is 64 GB root enough? My recent root uses about 31 of 32 GB.
3. does the concept of an usual /home on the SSD for the system's "user data" and an additional /home/RAID on the RAID1 for my own and important data make sense?

Best regards, the not-so-new guy