Re: /home partition @CompUser
It will not create a seperate partition for the /home directory.
I have only installed Mint once recently. It was on an EeePC that has a 4GB and a 16GB SSD, so quite a tight setup. Having first wiped the whole thing (it was previously OpenSuse) it most certainly did partition the discs without intervention - it has given me an 8.2GB root partition and a 7.9GB home partition - though I may have tweaked the exact split, I can't remember. The 4GB drive is given over to swap.
I have much more often installed OpenSuse these days. It, too, will suggest partitioning the disc by default. The machine I'm using to write this has a 120GB SSD divided into 32GB root, 8GB swap and 79GB home. Since building this machine I've installed 2x320GB HDDs in RAID1 which I use for local media files (e.g. videos I'm working on) and /home/videos (which is a standard subdirectory) redirects to that disc. Everything else lives on a NAS.
I've used Linux a fair bit but I'm not an expert.
Ditto. When I first dabbled with Linux some fifteen years ago it was like stepping back in time to the 1980s - my wife was a Mac OS user and I had been used to Windows and RiscOS and even Windows seemed (from a user's point of view) much more "together". I stuck with RiscOS. Ten years ago things were better, but having taken the RiscOS path I no longer had suitable hardware, nor the money to buy any. Five or six years ago when I was able to use some redundant hardware at work to look at it again, I was stunned at the progress and then, of course, along came the RaspberryPi. My RiscPC was well past its sell by date (though I still use it daily even now) and even my wife's fancy Mac Mini was getting long-in-the-tooth, so I scraped the money together to build a machine capable of running OpenSuse. I'm glad I did.
It is by no means perfect, but there are several distributions which are both easy enough for someone with a small amount of computer savvy to install, and not so dissimilar to Windows or OSX that they are unusable "out of the box". I wouldn't give someone with no computer experience a blank hard drive and a bootable installation on a USB stick, but then I wouldn't ask such a person to install Windows nor OSX from scratch either.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
