2d ago

How bad is my partitioning?

I just got a new laptop and installed Linux on it. I mainly run OpenSUSE.

Getting full encryption on both was a bit of a challenge and I had no idea what I'm doing. Will having the swap partition in the middle break things? Did I really need so many partitions (Mint and OpenSUSE don't show up in eachother's boot menu)?

I'm probably not gonna change this layout (because reinstallation seems like a pain) unless the swap partition's position is a problem. I'm just curious how many mistakes I made.

EDIT: I'm not upgrading my drive capacity. I do not need it.

72 comments

On a more serious note, as others have said, you'll probably burn through these weird storage limitations quickly.
Also, what do you mean by "sensitive matters" on Mint? Because almost any way you spin it, I feel like it's not a great idea:
If you're talking professional, confidential work with clients, keeping it on the same device where you do anything personal sounds like a terrible idea, and it's probably worth it to shell out for a dedicated device just for this.
If it's more personal things like government documents, medical records, and other things I'll neglect to name here, running a separate operating system just for those just feels like unnecessary paranoia and will cause you unnecessary trouble. If you're careful, it shouldn't be a problem - the major browsers prevent file access through protections against cross-site scripting.
Also, as I said in another comment here, please upgrade that drive before you put a lot of data on it. If you don't and you run out of storage later (a near-certainty on 256GB), you'll have to go through the effort of getting everything copied, which may include equipment purchases and several hours of your time when you could jut do it right now while your important files are still small enough to fit on a flash drive right now. Save yourself the future trouble.
Anyhow, I wish you happy Linux usage.
I would create another couple of efi partitions, just to confuse attackers more
Never more in my life have I wanted to send a stranger a larger hard drive.
- The laptop it's replacing also bad just 256gb of storage.
You don't need multiple EFI system partitions! That's why Mint and OpenSUSE don't show up in each other's boot menu (or at least that's the first step, depending on your bootloader). The intention with the ESP is you put all EFI executables for dual-booting (and triple- and beyond) in there.
Swap partition is fine anywhere. But as an aside, you can also just use a swapfile. Makes it easy to change the size dynamically. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file
/dev/nvme0n1p6 I'd wonder why that's needed. /boot on /dev/nvme0n1p10 too, that's not strictly necessary.
None are game-breaking! You can just note these down for next time you have the itch to tinker.
I think the partitioning itself is fine, but I wouldn't have 3 operating systems on a 256 GB NVMe, because I'd be running out of space a lot.
if you won't ever use Windows, you can nuke it. Then I'd consider making one of the Linux ones a VM - if you're trying out that distro. That will cut down 12 partitions to 5.
Lastly, you can look into btrfs to make better use of space between (the current) p11 and p12: you can make them subvolumes that won't eat up each other's storage when not in use.
- I'm only have about 20GB of files so I think I'll be fine on space.
  I'm keeping Windows 11 around in case I need it for ... IDK taxes (though I don't have secureboot enabled because [points to image above]). A VM won't work for the Mint one, I need it separate for reasons I won't go into.
  Btrfs was installed in default but I only know how to do full-disk encryption on ext4. Apparently btrfs doesn't have built-in support for it. I really liked how it was neatly organized into subvolumes but alas.
  
  Get a bigger drive. Swapping them out on modern laptops is often quite easy. Grab a copy of the manual or search for videos if you want to know more. Replacement 1tb nvme drives can be quite cheap these days, 2tb ones aren't especially price prohibitive either.
nuke it 😎
I really don't think 60 GB will be enough for daily use unless you have your home folder on a separate drive, which it doesn't seem is the case from your screenshot.
I have mine on a separate drive and my system partition (150 GB) is half-full. Is there a reason for your 25 GB per Linux installation rule?
- 25GB is what Ubuntu says is the minimum, and I'm extrapolating that to all distros. Windows says 64GB. I'd be surprised if I need more than 64GB per Linux install with just software installs.
  
  I would seriously advise you to double it to 50 GB each if you're intending to use these installs for more than web browsing and simple tasks using the packages that came with the distro. The exception to this would be if you have external drives/partitions that you're mounting into system directories (like your 20 GB of shared storage) because that data is obviously stored elsewhere.
  The minimum requirements are for the installation and basic use of the operating system as-is; actually using the system and installing other packages will generally require more space.
  
  Minimum is just an indicator of what will actually work, but it’s not gonna last.
  
  So you don't plan on installing any additional packages or downloading anything off the internet?
Why keep the windows partition if you don't use it?
- In case I need it in some scenario which I can't even conceive of.
  
  The pain of keeping it around will outweigh the pain of needing it and not having it.
  Quick boot into windows to help a friend test something on your machine?
  Twenty-five bajillion updates since you never logged in
  Windows "helpfully" cleaning up your Linux bootloader
  Any shared NTFS partition between windows and Linux is almost guaranteed to be left in a "dirty" state when windows shuts down, meaning you have to run ntfsfix before Linux will mount it again
  And suddenly, that's where you'll be spending the whole afternoon. I agree with the others who say a VM is probably good enough.
  
  Virtual Machine.
  My laptop came with Windows 11, I nuked it and installed Linux before even booting lol.
  
  Are you able to install a second SSD in your laptop? If you really need to keep it around, it's best practice to have Windows on its own physical drive.
  Or if it's feasible, make your old laptop your dedicated Windows machine.
  
  Troubleshooting for friends or getting paid for playing a kernel level game in my case.
I recommend that you take a look at LVM. It can help you manage your partitions without much planning beforehand.
- I'm averse to installing things that don't come with my distro. More software means more risk of a malicious update (which is the greatest security threat I face). Also seems a bit hacky so I'd be worried it'd cause instability. Plus I'm just not that technical.
  
  Well, good news then: lvm comes with most modern linux distros. In fact, it is an option you can enable when installing linux mint.
  I use it on every system that I run (workstations and servers) and never had any issues.
  It really just makes partition management way easyer: With normal partitions you cannot grow any partition without moving all other partitions after it. LVM can do it without touching anything else.
  The best case for semthing like this is when you buy bigger ssd. You can copy the data with dd and then grow any and partitions that you want without hassle.
Why don't you delete windows
- I am afraid that in the future something I need will require Windows 11. Whether that be interacting with the government or maybe if I go back to university.
  
  Can’t speak to your exact machine but nowadays the license tends to be tied to the hardware.
  If you are capable of manual partitioning then you should be able to reinstall Windows quickly if needed.
  
  VM might be enough
  
  Virt-manager can run windows in a vm
  
  It should be possible to grab the license key before you wipe it. You could also copy it into an external drive and store it away as is
You just got a new laptop and it has 250 GB of disk space?? Are you mad???
My Pendrive has 256 GB!
- I was looking for: Cheap, used, 1920p display, AMD CPU, 16gb RAM, presence of SSD, Linux bluetooth drivers, at least 2 USB ports, and a non-American brand. Storage capacity is something I'd only really care about on my gaming computer (or if I was still engaging in piracy).
Is the swap space unencrypted? If so it could potentially weaken overall system encryption
- Nope. I'm just now realizing that I need to do that.
If it works, it works. Unless you're working in Espionage, anything is honestly fine as long as your main storage is encrypted. The boot loader exploits still can't unencrypt things, just allow access to the data, which...still can't be decrypted as as we know.
It's fine.
- I should probably work out how to set up secureboot someday.
You have swap, which is pointless in this day and age, and will just burn a hole in the flash and delay the OOM killer doing its work. Look at ntfsresize to shrink that Windows partition down to the minimum. Then maybe image the partitions and obliterate them from the SSD. Use LVM instead to give yourself future flexibility. 1TB NVMe SSDs are so cheap these days they might as well put them in boxes of cereal.
- You can set the swappiness so that RAM gets filled before SWAP. You need it if your RAM isn't large enough for the stuff you want to do. You also need it for Hibernation to be the same or larger size like your RAM. Without it you can only suspend. You MUST use encrypted SWAP if you want to be really secure since otherwise your encryption key might be written onto your Nvme.
- The common misconception that swap is pointless stems from misunderstanding what it's supposed to do. You shouldn't be triggering the OOM killer frequently anyway. In the much more normal case where you're only using some of your RAM for running applications, the rest is used as a filesystem cache/buffer. Having swap space available gives your OP the option to evict stale application memory from RAM rather than the filesystem cache when that would be the optimal choice to make.
  This page explains it detail: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
I too think you should remove windows. But if you don't want to, take a clonezilla image of your hard drive now. Store it somewhere else of course. You then can always recover if this scheme gets weird.
Its the first thing I do when I get a new laptop. Then wipe windows. Then install Linux. If I have hardware issues I can simply restore windows for warranty.
In any case, I would pick one of those two Linux to be a primary. You don't want to get rid of mint or make it a VM. Ok third option: distrobox it.
- I probably should somehow get rid of Windows 11. It doesn't deserve to stay installed just because I might need it and have to reluctantly use it in 2027-2028. I'm not gonna change the partitioning system anytime soon unless the swap partition position is problematic.
- Looked it up and that's wrong. An SSD doesn't wear-level based on the partitions but on a firmware level.
  
  Yep, you're right. I'll delete my previous comment. Seems like my info was like 15+ years out of date.

72 comments