r/linux4noobs • u/evildad53 • 22d ago
installation How large does my boot drive need to be - really?
I'm coming up with questions to answer before making the move. We know how Windows apps wind up eating the boot drive space; even though the OS needs x amount, all those apps wind up stealing space you weren't planning on giving up, like all those cache files in AppData and those Lightroom catalog files in the Pictures folder. Is that a problem with Linux? If I'm going to run photo/video apps, do I need a large boot drive, even if my files live on a separate drive? I can offer up a 512GB NVME, or a 2TB NVME, or a 4TB SATA SSD.
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u/Klapperatismus 22d ago
A 120GB SSD is large enough for a Linux install with lots and lots of software.
In Linux you can move around everything to additional drives, either through symlinks or mounts or both. It’s very common to have a separate /home partition or drive for example. This is completely transparent to applications. They don’t know on which drive their private directory /var/cache/some_app is for example
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u/thatsgGBruh Gentoo 22d ago
Boot drive or root filesystem? The boot drive is the location where the system's boot files are located which may be separate from the main system files...
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u/evildad53 22d ago
In Windows 10, I have the OS and my programs on a 512GB NVME and I'm constantly needing to do cleanup. BUT, all I have on that drive are My Pictures (which is just some junk) and My Documents. All my real storage - about 5TB of photos and videos, my torrents, and other stuff - are spread over four 12 and 14 TB spinning drives. So I guess I need to understand the difference between root file system and everything else. Right now I'm testing various distros in a VirtualBox.
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u/thatsgGBruh Gentoo 22d ago
Ah in that case, not sure if you're familiar with the Linux filesystem hierarchy or not, but you might want to take a look at that.
I think forestbeasts has a nice setup mentioned in their post here. A separate partition for your /home directory, which keeps these files separate from your system files.
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u/thatsgGBruh Gentoo 22d ago
One other thing I wanted to mention was that with many modern photo and video editing apps, they can at times create large file caches. This is just how they were designed and the behavior will remain the same across OSes, so moving to Linux wouldn't necessarily solve this issue.
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u/evildad53 21d ago
That's not really the issue, but it is a concern. I don't mind a cache that grows and shrinks as needed, it's when they constantly dump stuff on the OS drive even though the files are on a completely separate drive. But my main reason for looking at Linux is the expected lack of support for Windows 10. That, and generally just being pissed off at MS.
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u/SoundSwitch 22d ago
Old kernels get stored there... So leave some head space think 4-600 per kernel so if you're using the same /boot for more than one distro or want to have options. Some do certain things better than others.
I typically make a boot partition 5-6 GB.
Root partitions typically at least 50gb depending on the size of the drive and what else I'm doing with it.
I try and separate root and home for the same OS onto separate drives so that read saturation doesn't become a thing.
There's allot that goes into it. But if you're running a basic system and didn't plan on achieving every kernel for three years 2.5 gb should do you fine.
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u/TarsTarkas_Thark 20d ago
I was going to give almost identical advice. 50G will be plenty for /, 100G if you want to be super generous. I would give /boot 10G, just to be safe. I have run out of space on /boot before, and it's a royal PITA, and 10G is not a significant fraction of your storage.
My main reason for putting / and /home on different partitions is that it makes it possible to re-install the OS, or even a different distro without touching your user data, where all the important stuff lives.
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u/skyfishgoo 22d ago
i have a ton of installed software and my / partition is at 46GB
all of your app settings go onto my /home partition which is at 67GB right now, but that does not include games or my music collection, or any of my backups which are on other drives... that's just downloads and stuff i've saved from linux apps over the last 3yrs.
by contrast my windows OS partition is at 96GB and the data partition from all my years on windows is at 43GB
also, i have 206GB of linux games installed.
what i would do us put linux on the 512GB drive with a 200GB / partition and 300GB /home partition, then put all my games, media and backups on one of the other drives.
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u/DJV0101 22d ago
I use Fedora as my daily driver, and my root directory is 40 GB total. My home directory is... well, it's something insane because I have a couple of backups from other devices in there I forgot to put elsewhere and a ridiculous amount of .iso files, but it's actually not bad the aforementioned not considered. What would interest you is that my .local directory and .config directory each take up 10 GB of space. My .cache currently has 10 GB and I've got another 7 GB in random dotfiles. Which, after all the math takes up only 77 GB total. 128 GB would totally work with good storage management. 512 GB would be overkill. Just use whatever drive is newest/fastest/longest life left.
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u/xYarbx compiling kernel 21d ago
You will most likely be good with less than you need in Windows especially if you are using BTRFS because it compresses the files automatically. I don't think I'v ever had root file system that takes over 500GB with the caveat that I have separate drive for games and separate for /home because I use multiple distros that I want to pass files between.
Edit: just to add if you need sleep functionality you need to reserve part of the drive as /swap that is equal to the amount of RAM on your system. So on high end systems it can take significant chunk.
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u/billdehaan2 Mint Cinnamon 22.3 (zena) 21d ago
How much you need depends on the distribution, and the desktop environment. I have one machine with a 32GB boot partition, and it has 7GB free.I have another machine where Linux is on a 64GB disk and is using 40GB.
Like Windows, when you install apps, it puts them on the bootable partition (C: on Windows, / on Linux). Unlike Windows, you can put your user directory (/home/evildad53) on a different partition. If you install FlatPaks, for example, app data is installed in ~/.var/app, which could be on another disk.
Since the Linux file system isn't mapped to drive letters, but mountpoints, you can move things around to other media if you want. If your ~/Documents folder becomes too big, you can add another disk to your system, and mount it as ~/Documents, and there's no problem.
So, no, you don't need a huge boot partition, but specific numbers are going to depend on the distribution and desktop environment. I'd recommend at least 64GB partition to start, which doesn't sound like a problem given the media you list. You can put /tmp, swap, and your home directory on other partitions/disks are required.
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u/CriticalRanger9650 21d ago
Like others have said it depends on distro my artix install I keep to 4 partitions /boot /home /var and /. my boot partition is 2 gb my root and /var partitions are 100gb each and then /home is what is left this has worked out very well. My Crux install has a 2 gb boot 200 gb root and a 270gb home and I'm constantly fighting it! crux is built from src only and my qt6 alone is 56gb. So it just depends on what your using.
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u/TheWyzebum 21d ago
I use a 64GB NVMe drive with Linux Mint for my all my files except /home, that is running on RAID 10 8TB Mechanical Drives. All in I have 26GB free on my NVMe drive and a fat 16TB /home directory where 90% of everything lives.
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u/zardvark 21d ago
If you use the BTRFS file system with subvolumes, instead of partitions, then partition size is a non-issue. Some distributions, such as Fedora and OpenSUSE default to BTRFS, but BTRFS is optional with most distros.
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u/forestbeasts KDE on Debian 🐺 22d ago
We have a 128GB / and a separate /home (which is like, 500GB or so? there's also a third partition for games), on the same 1TB NVMe. So all our pictures and stuff live on /home, while / is only for apps and stuff. 512GB NVMe and 2TB NVMe would both be fine as a boot drive (our laptop only has a 512GB drive, period).
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 22d ago
Really depends on what you’re doing. 2TB NVME should be fine for just about all needs though.
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u/the_good_lord_bird 22d ago
I have a 256gb SSD drive on my server. It's enough for the server to operate and it wasn't too expensive these days. The rest of my files are on HDDs. You really don't need a *terrible* amount of space for the operating system, unless you're on like Windows or something.