Do you use partitions on your Linux system?

[909mjolnir]

To be running a simple MBR-BIOS install is a true blessing. I have only one partition and no SWAP partition. For me, this is a huge change, as I used to ALWAYS create a SWAP partition. For a while I had the partition, then I changed to a SWAP file to use the space more effectively. But after I added some RAM, I realised that I don't even need the SWAP file. For a while I had a small SWAP file, but it still seemed to big for my needs and I couldn't figure out how to make it smaller.

I don't want my SSD to get thrashed or overused premature, so I prefer to just use RAM.
My whole hard drive is only about 64 GiB so I have to use it efficiently.

On the plus side, I use TimeShift to back up to an external USB drive which is 2 TiB.
Overall, life is good. I'm finding routine stability.

I like the idea of using partitions, especially to route overactive caches to their own partition. But I don't actually do this yet.

 

[MikeRocor]

I used to use different partitions for various purposes and invariably I'd blow the space estimates and one partition would end up full and in need of expansion while another would have one or two percent of its capacity used. So for the past several years I've just partitioned a tiny EFI partition and everything else goes on the boot partition.

I use a swap file rather than a swap partition because a) in my understanding, with modern kernels, the performance is pretty much the same and b) I hardly ever actually hit the swap anyway - its just there as a safety net. I did screw up recently by downloading a bunch of stuff (that turned out to be ten or a hundred times bigger than expected) into RAM and I hadn't enabled swap. That sucked.

I'm mostly using a laptop with only one HD but my backup/storage server has a separate boot drive (one partition) and a bigger data drive which is partitioned with an EFI partition (it's bootable as a backup of the boot drive) and a data partition taking up the rest of the drive.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Regarding swap, I have 16GB RAM so I could be fine without swap, however swap is still useful in special cases, I have a game which requires up to 48G RAM on biggest map settings, in this case swap is useful, kernel will do its best to utilize swap with stuff that's not frequently needed so performance issue accessing data on swap shouldn't even be noticed.

Also if you compile some big project you RAM may not be sufficient, I encountered this case as well and 24G swap helped me.
I'm sure there are other edge cases, think of a swap as of reserve memory for special cases.

 

[bob466]

To be running a simple MBR-BIOS install is a true blessing. I have only one partition and no SWAP partition. For me, this is a huge change, as I used to ALWAYS create a SWAP partition. For a while I had the partition, then I changed to a SWAP file to use the space more effectively. But after I added some RAM, I realised that I don't even need the SWAP file. For a while I had a small SWAP file, but it still seemed to big for my needs and I couldn't figure out how to make it smaller.

I don't want my SSD to get thrashed or overused premature, so I prefer to just use RAM.
My whole hard drive is only about 64 GiB so I have to use it efficiently.

On the plus side, I use TimeShift to back up to an external USB drive which is 2 TiB.
Overall, life is good. I'm finding routine stability.

I like the idea of using partitions, especially to route overactive caches to their own partition. But I don't actually do this yet.

This will be of help for your SSD...
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html

I've been doing this since I got my first SSD in 2019 and still using it.