linux What are the best options for partitioning a dual boot Linux/Windows on laptop

[excalibrax]

I'm getting a new laptop soon, to replace my work computer, my gaming laptop, and my home workstation. I travel for work, and I'm out on the road every week.

 

Linux use scenarios:

* Fedora 26 ( I'm a rhel consultant)

* minishift,

* docker,

* the new ansible tower running

* various vm's to simulate client enviorments.

* LUKS partition for encryption

 

Windows:

* Windows 10

* Overwatch

* Destiny 2

* Various other games at night

What is the best way to split up the partitions and drives. I'll have 1 TB M.2 SSD as the main drive to boot off of, and a 1 TB traditional spinning drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

So for the m.2 I'm thinking of splitting to windows 60/40 of the drive. to 600GB, and 400 for Linux, 40gb of that being swap. Though I'm familiar with installing both OS's, this will be my second time installing fedora with LUKS for encryption, and not sure how much space to set aside for it.

As for the HDD, I was planning on using it to store media and other files, possibly in a file format both windows and linux can read. Either that, or doing a split for it as well to install media, and games that I choose not to put on the m.2.

Any suggestions or useful tips would be appreciated.

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, excalibrax said:

I'm getting a new laptop soon, to replace my work computer, my gaming laptop, and my home workstation. I travel for work, and I'm out on the road every week.

 

Linux use scenarios:

* Fedora 26 ( I'm a rhel consultant)

* minishift,

* docker,

* the new ansible tower running

* various vm's to simulate client enviorments.

* LUKS partition for encryption

 

Windows:

* Windows 10

* Overwatch

* Destiny 2

* Various other games at night

What is the best way to split up the partitions and drives. I'll have 1 TB M.2 SSD as the main drive to boot off of, and a 1 TB traditional spinning drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

So for the m.2 I'm thinking of splitting to windows 60/40 of the drive. to 600GB, and 400 for Linux, 40gb of that being swap. Though I'm familiar with installing both OS's, this will be my second time installing fedora with LUKS for encryption, and not sure how much space to set aside for it.

As for the HDD, I was planning on using it to store media and other files, possibly in a file format both windows and linux can read. Either that, or doing a split for it as well to install media, and games that I choose not to put on the m.2.

Any suggestions or useful tips would be appreciated.

Instead of dual boot just download VMware and add Virtual Machines as many as you want...

[SCHISCHKA]

23 minutes ago, excalibrax said:

rhel consultant

how'd you score that gig?

[SCHISCHKA]

32 minutes ago, excalibrax said:

So for the m.2 I'm thinking of splitting to windows 60/40 of the drive. to 600GB, and 400 for Linux, 40gb of that being swap. Though I'm familiar with installing both OS's, this will be my second time installing fedora with LUKS for encryption, and not sure how much space to set aside for it.

 

for linux.

5 to 10GB for /, im using 841mb. using less than 5GB caused me problems in the past when upgrading

I dont know what you need for /opt I only use about 2GB

/usr needs about 10GB, im currently using 3GB

then theres space for vm.

I put /var on mechanical disk coz thats where all the logs are, I'm using about 500MB but you might want at least 2GB

I put swap on mechanical disk, with 32GB of ram you likely wont use swap except hibernation or suspend to disk.

if you are not developing software then you do not need /home on SSD.

[Windows7ge]

In my opinion the best solution would be to test how much space you know you'll need for both. Then consider how much expansion you feel is really necessary. This however takes time to figure out and it's something only you can do because it's different for everyone.

 

Alternatively you could split the boot drive 50/50 and if you find that you need more storage on one partition with room to spare on the other you can go through the process of shrinking & expanding the partitions.

 

As for a drive that could share data between the two OS's. The only file system that allows full RWX capability is FAT32. I've been told NTFS isn't fully supported at least not on every version of Linux. So long as you don't need to share data files larger than 2GB and don't need to store more than 65,517 files it should work fine. I have this issue sharing files between Windows and OSX.

[excalibrax]

@SCHISCHKAinteresting idea, I hadn't though of putting the swap or other drives on the regular HDD.

 

I got the gig as a new college grad in Computer Networking and Systems administration, My senior year Red Hat was at the Computer Career Fair, I got to talking to the recruiters at a mixer the night before. I had some done some self study on using Ansible with networking, along with a cloud computing class where we installed and learned to use Openstack. On top of that I think I did well at the socializing part of the interview process which is key when your a consultant going out and meeting new folks every few weeks. I also was looking at getting a job with a networking company at the time, but compared the offers, and looked what some of my friends were doing that graduated ahead of me, and decided, given the opportunity, that I would learn more and have fun traveling, then going the regular sysadmin route at another company, or for my other offer being a call center networking flunky for a big networking company.

 

@Raziq_26 Not really an option, I work for a company called Red Hat, walking in client doors, and not running linux, that and for our tech support has limited support for windows.

[Guest]

12 hours ago, excalibrax said:

@SCHISCHKAinteresting idea, I hadn't though of putting the swap or other drives on the regular HDD.

 

I got the gig as a new college grad in Computer Networking and Systems administration, My senior year Red Hat was at the Computer Career Fair, I got to talking to the recruiters at a mixer the night before. I had some done some self study on using Ansible with networking, along with a cloud computing class where we installed and learned to use Openstack. On top of that I think I did well at the socializing part of the interview process which is key when your a consultant going out and meeting new folks every few weeks. I also was looking at getting a job with a networking company at the time, but compared the offers, and looked what some of my friends were doing that graduated ahead of me, and decided, given the opportunity, that I would learn more and have fun traveling, then going the regular sysadmin route at another company, or for my other offer being a call center networking flunky for a big networking company.

 

@Raziq_26 Not really an option, I work for a company called Red Hat, walking in client doors, and not running linux, that and for our tech support has limited support for windows.

Oh Great I am also RedHat Certified Engineer! Oh so for that you will need Dual Boot! For that why dont you take Both HDD and M.2 You will get great performance...