So I’ve decided that my linux college laptop is going to be a 13. I’ll be studying computer science, and gaming, if any on this computer, will be light. The most involved thing I might run would be FFXIV, and I don’t care about graphics settings. This seems perfect for me.
I had hoped to have dual drives, a small one for Linux and a larger one for my home directory, though only having one drive is not a dealbreaker. My question is A. If I have separate partitions on the same drive, and had planned on a TB of storage, how big should the linux partition be? I can consider springing for the 2TB, but it’s pricy.
Second question: Would using the plug in SSD work for eithe rmy linux drive (if I pick the 250gb), or the home directory, (if I pick the 1tb)? If I put the home directory on the external, I’d have an internal SSD of 250ish, maybe 500, for the boot, linux and swap, partitions. I’m leanign towards having this be the internal drive. Will it cause problems if I have the home directly on an external drive, or the utility/os directoryes on the removable? It’ll take up a valuable expansion slot, but might give me waht I want.
So optoins:
1 TB, no separate home partition.
1 TB, separate home partition, not sure how big to make linux partition
2 TB, separate home partition, linux partitions.
250gb external, 1tb internal for linux/home respectively
1tb external home, 250 gb internal linux drive.
Any of these stand out for my usecase of computer science and programming on Linux?
Bonus question: 32 gb enough for computer programming if I’m not doing graphical programming yet?
Well, it is always good to have enough RAM (so you can leverage decent tmpfs-filesystems to speed up all system based I/O). On the other hand, I tend to always make the following setup:
/ - 300GBytes
/boot/efi - 1GByte
/home - 699 GBytes - symlink to /opt → data local
/opt - 1TB
The reason is pretty simple:
I know which apps are no system apps → /opt
I know which directory I have to backup → /home
I know which applications are not important (can be installed manually → /opt)
The operating system can be installed very easily. I can reinstall over it (formatting / and /boot/efi and keep /opt and /home) and instead of doing an upgrade, install a new release of a distribution.
On server systems I tend to also create dedicated partitions for /var/tmp and /var/log - while /tmp is a tmpfs (ram filesystem).
If you have only 1 drive, definitely take a TB device. I took the SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB SSD for my daughters FW13, as it has the lowest idle power requirements from tests, while being quite fast. Makes your battery last longer.
Using myself the same drive on a FW16 and very happy about my choice.
Regarding SWAP. I am using Linux since 1992, and to be honest, since I have 32+ GB of ram in my systems, I disabled SWAP completely. Not required anymore.
Only time it would be required is if you want to suspend the laptop. But the, your SWAP partition has to be a little larger than the amount of RAM you have in your device.
Since Linux is pretty fast at booting, and KDE Plasma is session aware, I tend to just configure it to remember the session and restore it on next boot.
But that is a personal preference.
Do you plan on taking any specialized modules? If not, 32GB should be enough for the next few years. But hey, you can upgrade the RAM down the road if needed.
Yeah, I had what - a 286AT @ 12MHz with ISA Bus and 512kBytes of RAM and a 40mByte MFM IDE Drive, + a monochrome hercules graphics card and a Bernstein monitor.
The entire lot made up for 35KG of weight??? Hahaha
That is definitely enough. Just make sure you take 2x16GBytes to take advantage of Bank interleave (speeds up overall memory access). Just stick to the specs as provided by Framework.
I have 32GBytes, but I barely scratch the surface of it. I need the RAM when starting up Windows VM’s. Linux under Virtualbox requires way less resources, and most of the time I rune docker container native, which require even less resources.
personally i wouldn’t recommend dual booting. maintaining two operating systems and studying at the same time isn’t ideal. if you need to have windows use windows, if you don’t need to have windows use linux.
if you still want to dual boot it’s probably because you want to do more intensive stuff on windows (including playing FFXIV, which by the way you can also do on linux) so i’d say you just do a 500M EFI partition, then 70% of the rest for windows and 30% for linux. no separate home partition, it’s not necessary. the benefits aren’t worth it and often these days if you break your system you don’t want to restore your entire home directory.
stick to the nvme drive, don’t use the expansion card to install operating systems on, unless it’s meant to be a temporary thing you don’t really need to maintain since it can potentially break.
Won’t be using windows on the os, was looking for ways to have a seaprate home directory from the linux install, rather than a differetn os. But I’ve decided not to worry about it, so one SSD will be fine for me. That said, I think I’m going with the 16 after all, I’d just be more comfortable using the larger screen size, and I like the added modularity. I also worked out that it’s within my budget.
