Reply to post: Re: Partitioning

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Stoneshop

Re: Partitioning

a user who already backs up their data

And I am Florence Nightingale. If they do, it's on to an USB stick at best. Which will get overwritten with the ISO to reinstall their system.

This assumes that you'll be reinstalling a lot, which they probably won't

I've been using a separate /home since starting using Linux, now about 25 years ago. Having to reinstall because of any reason between 'something irreversably broke' and 'moving to another distro' just came with the territory. And even with the disk sizes back then you just put /home, /var and /usr on separate partitions, even if that would keep you from using the free space in one to fix a shortage in another.

Nowadays, disk is cheap, effort is not. Over the last ten years at least I haven't had to reinstall a borked OS, although I did a few reinstalls for other reasons. And even with backups already made, not having to touch /home saves time and effort. Experimental systems with small disks may be a different matter, but I have sufficient spare disks around that were replaced by SSDs that I could fit 320G or more in any laptop with a smaller disk, and there's even a surplus 600G SSD for that.

My gf started using Linux some seven years ago, and wanted to do so by trying out a few user-friendly distros. That's a clear reason for having a separate /home, and even after settling on one the benefits have outweighed the downside. Also, none of them were ones I was using, so I told her that fixing things would be 90% up to her. She now supports newbies moving to Mint, and if there's one class of users that are prone to blowing up their Linux installs it's the ones starting fresh today. "I'm not using Python, so I deinstalled it". Bravo, you have also removed your software manager. "Do you have /home on a separate partition? Then just reinstall, and tell the installer there's a /home already that shouldn't be formatted."

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