[Installation] Pre-Install Disk Partition Questions

[clh333]

Greetings all! First post here.

I am a long-time user of Fedora, sometime dabbler with Debian and SUSE, but am about to move to KUBUNTU. The reason for the switch is immaterial to this question but if you're curious I'll list my reasons at the bottom.

To the point: Machine is an ASUS MD AMD7 processor 32Gb RAM 2Tb HD. Disk had been partitioned with Windows10 occupying 1 Tb and the second partition subdivided into Fedora32 and Windows7 installations. GRUB2 would load either of these OS if the UFI BIOS was directed to boot from the second partition. The default was partition 1 / Win10.

Two days ago I was in Fedora 32, running the dnf utility to update packages. Halfway through a lengthy upgrade the power went out for a second or so and the result was that dnf did not finish and left itself in a state where it could not be restarted. I posted on the Ask Fedora site and received guidance that was perhaps well-meant but somewhat inaccurate. The result of my following this advice was that I could no longer boot the machine into Fedora 32 at all. Believe me, I tried.

Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Fedora 33 from a live disk. I have a working installation but I really don't like being forced to install the new version, especially since I lost the use of programs and data that had taken a lot of effort to acquire. I remembered earlier versions of Fedora (7, 8, 9) that allowed a choice of desktops and my preference had always been KDE. I found a KUBUNTU live CD, tried it out and now I would like to install it. But the question that brings me to post here is this:

Fedora has always used a very complicated file system with a rabbit's warren of a directory structure: Three partitions with different formats and a myriad of folders and sym-links that may be very efficient but make file searching a nightmare. I read the suggested file structure for KUBUNTU and from what I gathered KUBUNTU can run on a single primary partition of less than 100 Gb. A fancy structure appears to be /root > 25 Gb, /swap one-half the size of RAM and a /home directory that uses the balance of the partition. But it will run with just /root.

So here I am asking for the advice of experienced users: Knowing what you know, how would you advise me to partition the space? I have deleted all the partitions, primary and logical, under the second, 1 Tb partition, and will devote the entire partition to KUBUNTU. I'm not familiar with the installer but when I ran it earlier today it seemed to want to automatically select the first partition, where Windows resides, so I think I will be dividing the space manually.

Thanks for your suggestions,
-CH-

If you read this far and are still curious, here are my reasons for the switch: I don't like the constant need to install a new version - every six months or so. The upgrade migration is lengthy and perilous; it takes hours to complete, has many steps and lots can go wrong. The new version always has teething problems and often obsoletes packages that you would like to keep. Package maintainers have to scramble to adapt to new code and you find that either the package is missing or there are a spate of updates as new "features" are discovered. The GNOME desktop is usable but not very user-friendly and difficult to modify in any significant way. And I don't like the fact that there is no "rollback" for updates and no "reinstallation" that is not destructive. I know I'm asking a lot of a product that is published for free and maintained by volunteers; I don't have any axe to bear against Red Hat or their developers. But I think I'm ready to see what KUBUNTU can do.

[claydoh]

If you read this far and are still curious, here are my reasons for the switch: I don't like the constant need to install a new version - every six months or so. The upgrade migration is lengthy and perilous; it takes hours to complete, has many steps and lots can go wrong. The new version always has teething problems and often obsoletes packages that you would like to keep. Package maintainers have to scramble to adapt to new code and you find that either the package is missing or there are a spate of updates as new "features" are discovered. The GNOME desktop is usable but not very user-friendly and difficult to modify in any significant way. And I don't like the fact that there is no "rollback" for updates and no "reinstallation" that is not destructive. I know I'm asking a lot of a product that is published for free and maintained by volunteers; I don't have any axe to bear against Red Hat or their developers. But I think I'm ready to see what KUBUNTU can do.

Everything I have bolded above can be considered true for *buntu distros as well, and the rest are a bit less common but not immune. However, with the LTS track, if you don't like getting anything new ever , this can be mitigated to a two+ year cycle. But with a longer period of time for changes and obsolescences to build up Upgrades, are fairly simple and not too involved, and have less chance for breakages if done every 6 months as core updates are usually less invasive, or at least fewer in number every cycle.

I am a firm believer in upgrading, though I am in a bit of a minority as most who have an opinion swear by clean installs every time. We have no rollbacks here, either, unless you manually partition and set up btrfs.

I have not used Fedora in quite some years. Didn't care for it, but I didn't put any time into it, either.


tl;dr same sh** different distro

Luckily is it super easy to try Kubuntu live, and super easy to install, if using the automatic options. It is not even overly difficult to do custom partitioning, really, but anything complex will be difficult unless someone before you has done similar installs and has documented it.

[jlittle]

Some observations...

1. "ASUS MD AMD7 processor 32Gb RAM 2Tb HD" has me scratching my head. Is AMD7 an AMD Ryzen 7? That would be consistent with 32 GiB of RAM (Gb is "gigabit", usually used to describe network speeds), but not with no SSD and hints of MBR partitioning,
2. 32 GiB RAM means that unless you do video editing or giant simulations and stuff like that, a swap partition is not needed. I use one, out of habit really, and because a swap file on btrfs has been discouraged.
3. You clearly want btrfs IMO, with only one big partition. (Btrfs the default fs for Fedora 33, but I don't know how that will be organized.) *buntus with btrfs install to just two subvolumes, one for root, and another for /home, and it's trivial to rename them and that works really well. So well, you could have lots of distros in the same btrfs - I've got about 6 at the moment. A bad update? Reverse it in seconds. Oops, some files on the updated system? They're still there, just copy them.
4. Maybe the ASUS won't let you in, but look hard to get an SSD in somehow, even just a small one.
   
   Maybe there's an M.2 slot.
5. "I don't like the constant need to install a new version - every six months or so." Go with an LTS then. That can mean some software gets old, but there's usually ways to fix that if needed.
6. I always manually partition, but then carefully tell the installer what I've decided.
7. Gnome is awful IMO. It appeals to those who have damaged their brains and eyes with Apple products.

[oshunluvr]

What jlittle said: If you're wiping and starting over, then I would use GPT partitioning and make:

1. A small EFI or BOOT_BIOS partition (depending on your needs - ask about this if you're unsure).
2. A SWAP partition if you plan on using hibernation or suspend, otherwise, skip it.
3. A large btrfs partition in the remaining space.

Optional - since you have so much drive space:

• If you tend to play around with other distros and want to have some space to install to and then wipe clean after you're done, make a 20-30 GB playground partition or two.
• If you intend on using VMs, could could make a separate EXT4 partition for virtual hard drives. 250GB would give you enough for 10 or so VMs.

IMO, you might consider investing in a small cheap UPS so you don't have power glitches like that in the future.

[clh333]

Thanks to all for your suggestions. I installed KUBUNTU today and my initial impression is favorable. I have a few configuration issues to work out but I feel right at home with the desktop.

Before installing KUBUNTU I installed Fedora's KDE "spin" and decided it was not for me. I ran into configuration problems almost immediately - for example the network manager, which couldn't recognize devices on the router or access the Internet at anything more than a crawl.

I installed KUBUNTU over it. I manually configured the second partition as /root 100 GB ext4, /swap 90 GB, /home rest of available space, ext4. btrfs I know nothing about and I just wanted to get something up and running.

I built this machine four or five years ago and at the time SSDs - of the size that I wanted - were prohibitively expensive. I come from the graphics industry and at one time was doing a lot of digital photography so more RAM is always desirable. The objective was to have a dual-boot machine but my employers have all been staunch MS supporters, so one OS was going to have to be Windows.

I've been playing with Linux since RedHat 7 but I only know enough to get by. Still, I realize it has capabilities that are missing in other software environments.

Thanks again for your help. I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, yeah - a UPS is on the list, too.

-CH-

[oshunluvr]

Some final comments:

SWAP:
While understanding you have lots of drive space, 90GB SWAP is literally space that will never be used. To try and put a finer point on it- you could install Kubuntu four more times in that space and still not use it all.

With 32GB of RAM, you'd have to launch everything all at once to even come close to needing SWAP. The only scenario where you'd touch SWAP is if you had a run-away process with a memory leak that eventually filled your RAM, but that is very unlikely and if that did happen, the solution wouldn't be to continue to allow it to grow. The ONLY use for SWAP in your setup would be to hibernate, and then you'd need 32GB. I have 16GB RAM and the only time I used swap over the last 4 years was a bad implementation of kwin that would eventually (after hours) fill my RAM. It was a bug that was fixed in a few days.

With that much RAM I can recommend setting your /tmp into RAM. This has a couple advantages - speeds up tmp access during operations using it, prevents a "tmp full" condition from leaving your system unusable, and automatically clears at every reboot without fail. My fstab has this in it:

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#000000]##TMPFS in RAM 
t[/COLOR]mpfs /tmp tmpfs noatime,mode=1777,size=16G 0 0[/FONT]

This sets a /tmp size of 16GB in RAM. It automatically uses SWAP space if RAM becomes too full to hold everything in /tmp. I have a 16GB SWAP to match this entry.

BTRFS:
Understandable that you didn't want to dig into a new (to you) file system on the cusp of jumping distros. There a quite a few of us now using BTRFS almost exclusively. As jlittle pointed out, installing a *buntu based distro to BTRFS removes the requirement to have a separate partition for /home because BTRFS uses "subvolumes" to segregate data. These subvolumes reside on a single file system, sharing free space, yet keeping data separate. They are easily snapshot-ted to allow roll-backs, transportable ("send" and "receive" operations) to provide easy backup operations or relocation of data, drives and/or partitions can be added to or removed from a single file system in any configuration (various RAID levels or JBOD), and one can install multiple distros to a single file system (I currently have 7), and all this is done without taking the file system off-line - meaning you can still use the computer while doing all of this. It's worth considering down the road.

[mr_raider]

BTRFS is standard on FEdora now! Get with the times