Re: ...not even a separate partition for /home.
> Something else is a bit daunting if you don't know what you're doing
I agree that it is, but it also something you probably shouldn't do *unless* you know what you are doing.
The basic options of use whole disk/largest free space, plus the standard Debian 'recipes' of
> All files in one partition (recommended for new users)
> Separate /home partition
> Separate /home, /var, and /tmp partitions
already give you more flexibility than the interactive Windows installer, so I think it is unfair to criticise the advanced 'something else' option for being harder to use; there just isn't a reasonable equivalent to compare.
The default one-size-fits-all of using a single partition for everything is also what the Windows installer does, and it's a sensible default because you can't make a good automatic guess at the relative sizing of stuff - maybe you've got a webserver producing copious logs, maybe you have lots of large media files, maybe you have a pipeline that involves lots of intermediate steps (so in the Linux example, biasing disk usage towards /var, /home and /tmp respectively) - if you do one of the three then you're going to need that volume to be much bigger than the other two, but the installer can't possibly guess in advance. Producing all three at 1/3 the size each is worse for any of these use cases than just using a single volume for the lot.
(I'm ignoring custom Windows images that include extra disk layout information, since there is an equivalent for the Debian Installer - preseed.cfg, but neither have been discussed).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
