How should I partition my 500gb nvme 3.0 drive for arch linux?

[penguin1]

Title sais it all. Thanks for all help.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Are you only installing arch?

 

Probalby like 500mB efi, 1gb /boot. And the rest for the / partition. Make a seperate swap if you want. Pick the filesystem you like. LVM can be nice.

[penguin1]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Are you only installing arch?

 

Probalby like 500mB efi, 1gb /boot. And the rest for the / partition. Make a seperate swap if you want. Pick the filesystem you like. LVM can be nice.

Only arch. Windows is on a 1tb nvme 4.0. What commands should I use? When I use fdisk it asks for commands. (I am arch noob btw)

[penguin1]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Are you only installing arch?

 

Probalby like 500mB efi, 1gb /boot. And the rest for the / partition. Make a seperate swap if you want. Pick the filesystem you like. LVM can be nice.

I dont know what file system I want, but is LVM good? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, penguin1 said:

Only arch. Windows is on a 1tb nvme 4.0. What commands should I use? When I use fdisk it asks for commands. (I am arch noob btw)

Id really suggest you start with another linux distro. Don't start with arch.

 

There are a lot of guides

 

gdisk makes gpt partitions, don't use fdisk, no reason to use mbr here.

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, penguin1 said:

I dont know what file system I want, but is LVM good? 

Depends on what you want. It does make it more complex to setp.

[penguin1]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on what you want. It does make it more complex to setp.

I am switching from manjaro, but all of those distros do the work for you. (manjaro drive died horrible death so just going to start fresh with arch)

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, penguin1 said:

I am switching from manjaro, but all of those distros do the work for you. (manjaro drive died horrible death so just going to start fresh with arch)

Have you looked at guides for installing arch?

 

Why do you wan tto switch to arch? id really learn a bit more about how it works, and follow some install guides in a vm first. 

[penguin1]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Have you looked at guides for installing arch?

 

Why do you wan tto switch to arch? id really learn a bit more about how it works, and follow some install guides in a vm first. 

I am following the drive on the arch wiki. I just want to learn the process and tinker. Are there some other good guides to try?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, penguin1 said:

I am following the drive on the arch wiki. I just want to learn the process and tinker. Are there some other good guides to try?

Look at lvm, the other filesystems, and other parts of the linux storage system to get a feel for how they work. Just gotta play with it.

[kelvinhall05]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide#Partition_the_disks

[Sauron]

There's a guide on the wiki on how to do this, personally I recommend making an LVM volume with just the EFI partition, the swap partition and a root partition. Some prefer to have a dedicated partition for their home folder but I find it clunky and if you need to migrate your home folder you can literally just copy its contents over.

[Drama Lama]

7 hours ago, penguin1 said:

Are there some other good guides to try?

try archfi ! it makes installing arch much easier

or you could use the manjaro architect installer

[gardotd426]

Whoever said having a separate /home partition is "clunky" is full of nonsense. You should always have your /home on another partition. If something happens to the OS and you don't have /home on its own partition, you might not be able to "just copy it over" to a new install. What if your drive is almost full? Hell even if it's only half full, you won't even have enough room to move everything around and copy everything over.

 

So this is what you want:

 

500-750MB EFI System Partition (formatted as FAT32 and with the boot flag enabled), mounted at /boot/efi (NOT /boot). 

 

60-ish (between 50 and 70) GB ext4 partition, mounted at /

 

The rest of your free space (except a space at the end equivalent to twice your RAM amount) formatted as ext4, mounted at /home

 

The rest, twice the size of your RAM amount (so like 32GB if you have 16GB RAM) formatted as linux-swap. 

 

I highly suggest starting with Manjaro, though, and not Arch. Get a sense for how an Arch-based system works, and after a few weeks you can try installing Arch in a VM, and after you do that once or twice, you can try actually installing Arch. And since you will have /home on a separate partition, literally all you'll have to do is install the system on the root partition, add the /home partition to your /etc/fstab, and you'll have ALL your same user configuration/customizations. 

[Nayr438]

13 hours ago, gardotd426 said:

Whoever said having a separate /home partition is "clunky" is full of nonsense. You should always have your /home on another partition. If something happens to the OS and you don't have /home on its own partition, you might not be able to "just copy it over" to a new install. What if your drive is almost full? Hell even if it's only half full, you won't even have enough room to move everything around and copy everything over.

There is little reason to have a separate partition for "/home" and you shouldn't copy the direct contents of "/home" between installs as you would also be potentially copying settings and references to non existent files or modified variables between installs, which can be problematic. If you need a seperate partition, you would be better off symlinking important folders or storing files on a partition not mounted as "/home"

 

13 hours ago, gardotd426 said:

500-750MB EFI System Partition (formatted as FAT32 and with the boot flag enabled), mounted at /boot/efi (NOT /boot).

There is no reason to have a EFI partition larger than 512MiB and would be fine with something smaller, it only houses the EFI boot files. 300MiB is usually what I go after and should be more than enough space.

 

13 hours ago, gardotd426 said:

60-ish (between 50 and 70) GB ext4 partition, mounted at /

Why does it need to be ext4? There are several other file-systems available that may better suit your needs. Personally I always go after F2FS and XFS.

 

13 hours ago, gardotd426 said:

The rest, twice the size of your RAM amount (so like 32GB if you have 16GB RAM) formatted as linux-swap.

There is little to no reason to have 32GB of SWAP space on a system with 16GB of RAM. You should only need 16GB of SWAP space if you plan to dump the contents of memory into SWAP for something like hibernation. Going with something around 8GB would be fine. If your hitting SWAP space enough to fill that up, you have other problems. Also what about a managed swapfile, which may fit the users needs.

 

 

There is really no right or wrong way to partition your install, so long as it does what you want it to do. I would look into the pros and cons of various file systems and see if LVM or BTRFS subvolumes and snapshots are something you are interested in.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/file_systems

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LVM

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/swap

[10leej]

512mb for /boot

4gb or less for swap (you should run swap it's baked into the Linux kernel to use it), if you plan to use hibernation then match your system RAM

60gb for / (root) unless you dont plan to use flatpak/snaps then 30gb is fine

rest of the disk can then saved for /home

[jojito]

On 2/7/2021 at 11:37 AM, Nayr438 said:

Also what about a managed swapfile, which may fit the users needs.

I was just looking for someone to say this. Having a swap file can be better in the future as you can much more effortlessly change the allocated size after you have discovered just how much swap you'll be fine with, also I would recommend that you match your system memory for hibernation as only having half of the system memory as swap may cause problems.