I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it’s been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol.
Fortunately I kept my /home on its own partition, so this shouldn’t be too bad to get back up and running as desired.
Keeping /home separate is a good call. I can also recommend backups to a different system. Also test those backups.
Playing with things can be fun if that is what you enjoy. Being careful is good but the best way to avoid serious issues is being able to recover from the worst case.
I personally don’t do it because the more partitions you have, the more often you need to fiddle around in GParted when one partition gets full. This is also why I use swap files instead of swap partitions
As far as I can tell, unless you distro-hop, separating /home doesn’t have any advantages. Even then, sharing one /home directory between multiple desktop environments can cause some problems
I agree with making and testing backups, though. My current strategy is to back everything up to a 4.2 TiB ZFS pool with daily snapshots on my LAN, and back up the most important data on that to the cloud
Not the person above, but if it is an issue you ever run into you are doing it “wrong”. Not really, but let me explain.
Having it on a separate partition has a few advantages like different mount flags (e.g. noexec), easier backup management (especially snapshots) and some other benefits like using your home for a new installation (like OP wants to) or it prevents some critical failures in case you accidentally fill it up (e.g. partial writes or services cannot start).
I often cannot decide on specific mount sizes either, because requirements may change depending on what you do. Hence I would just stick with some reasonable defaults for the installation and use some form of volume manager instead. If you want to use ext4, xfs etc I would recommend using LVM as it gives you a lot of freedom (resizing of volumes, snapshots and adding additional drives, mixed RAID modes etc) or there are btrfs, zfs or bcachefs to name the most common file systems which implement their own idea of storage pools and volumes.
Never should you need to resize a partition, there are more modern approaches. Create a single partition (+ a small EFI partition somewhere) and never bother with partitions ever again. The (performance) overhead is negligible and it gives so many additional benefits I didn’t even mention. Your complaint is a solved problem.
I don’t think it is critical to keep /home separate but if you need to reinstall it is really nice. You can reset the OS without touching your data or user-level configs. Either for the same distro because you fiddled around and broke it or another one for distro-hopping. It also makes encrypting it easy, although full-disk encryption is getting so easy that it probably isn’t an issue. Good backups also mitigate this, although the recovery will be slower than just reinstalling while leaving your existing home there.
To be honest I don’t actually keep home separate anymore. But that is mostly because I trust NixOS enough that I know I will never need to reinstall. I can always roll back or worst case install over top of the existing install from a live USB.
Overall I would say that the cost of doing so is fairly small as well. Unless you are running a lot of system services data outside of /home is usually fairly limited. Although I agree that getting the partition sizes wrong can be frustrating.
If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.
Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.
At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.
I think I know what the issue was… I modified the grub.cfg file and ran grub2-mkconfig and I think it was saying it detected a Linux install at my root partition, but didn’t seem to recognize my /boot or /boot/efi partitions and I couldn’t figure out how to edit that via the grub cli. If that wasn’t the case, then that’s okay. I’ll make sure to teach myself a bit more about the bootloader before trying to edit it again
Sweet, welcome! :) I know the feeling. I just finished reinstalling Nobara after being dumb and goofing up patching. Then I tried to fix it and made the system totally unusable and I gave up.
A while ago I jacked my grub config and decided to try to fix it manually. I managed to stumble through it and learned some stuff, though I am still fuzzy on some details.
I mostly want to just use the computer without a lot of headache and both Mint and Nobara have been great for coding (various), electronics design, 3d modeling and printing, graphics, photo editing, and such.
This is why I gave up on fixing it yesterday lol. I spent a few days setting it up, I didn’t wanna spend a few more days to try to figure out exactly what the issue was when I could just give in and then actually use it
Totally valid! Theoretically with more experience it may be easier / faster to fix but…idk
See this is why I keep /home on a separate partition (or drive in some cases). I can reinstall or switch distros anytime without worrying about all my files (they’re backed up, anyway but doing a restore is a pita).
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