Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] suggest SSD partitioning

[Nils Freydank]

Hi,

my thoughts:

If you use an EFI/UEFI you will need a so called ESP, i.e. a FAT32 partition.
FAT32 is ugly from a linux user's perspective (e.g. it doesn't support symlinks
as far as I know and being regularly told by other users), but I'm putting
/boot on that partition for at least seven years now without any trouble.

I would always tend for a swap partition to avoid additional overhead from
filesystems in between (beside the fact that I'm using mostly btrfs which
couldn't host swap files for a long time).

AFAIR a binary distribution I used lately takes RAM size for systems without
hibernation and double the size for hibernation (it was most probably either
linux mint or manjaro).
Just imagine your system was already swapping and then you would hibernate, so
you would need your 'normal' swap space plus enough free space to save all data
from RAM on your SSD.

Last but not least I try out too much different software and have full disk
encryption with LUKS literally everywhere a x86 CPU runs, so _my_ favorite
layout is:

first partition: /boot inside the ESP for UEFI
second partition: LUKS with btrfs inside (or LVM + ext4 if I didn't need
                  btrfs features)
third partition: encrypted swap (LUKS, too)

My system is a Notebook with 32 GiB RAM and I choose arbitrarily 18 GiB for
swap wich is empty or filled with a few hundred megabytes most of the time.
I don't use hibernation.

My /var/tmp/portage has a size of 14 GiB wich is enough to compile firefox,
rust, libreoffice and qtwebengine (not at once, of course).

Hope that helps you and much fun with your new drive!

Kind regards,
Nils