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It's fine. I give my systems a 20G or 30G root file system.
If you use Flatpak then make sure you do user installs. If you add the remote as a user remote then all installs are user installs.
If you use VMs then create a storage pool for the disks in your home filesystem. I create a /home/libvirt/ for this.
Basically just be mindful not to fill your root filesystem.
Would you please explain (then all installs are user install). I dont use flatpack, but the last time I used it (on Tumbleweed) I remember it downloaded its applications/runtime stuff to /var/lib/flatpak then installing them to ~/.local/share/flatpak in the home folder of every user who runs those flatpak applications.
You added the Flatpak repo as a "system" repo with:
flatpak remote-add flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
As such, the downloaded applications are stored by the system in /var like you said.
If you run installs as user installs, eg:
flatpak --user install com.example.appname
Then the application is stored in your home directory, not in /var.
You can also add the Flatpak repo as a "user" repo, eg:
flatpak --user remote-add flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Now all installs will behave as if you passed --user to the install command. All installs will go to your home directory, none will go to /var
Thank you very much for the explanations.
No worries! I hope this helps you enjoy Flatpak :)
This is my one gripe with Debian's installer. I don't mind it setting defaults like 27G for / and 10G or whatever for /tmp. But I don't like that you can't stop it from allocating the entire volume. If it left a few hundred GB unallocated, then it would be trivial to expand whichever one you realize you need to expand later on.
As it is, if you want to give more room to one partition or another later on, you have to shrink /home first. If /home is ext4, that's inconvenient. If it's XFS, though, it's a nightmare.
LVM gives you the ability to downsize and resize without having to worry about partitions boundaries. So, if you find yourself in need for storage you can downsize the home partition and grow the root.
That said, I have debian/i3 INSTALLED ON A 16GB USB with a couple of docker containers and vscodium and it is around 10/14gb usage.
I'm totally going to try that now! I wonder if I could use this to avoid Windows on the terrible computers at my school. Does it boot just like installation media or something?
That is why I'm actually doing it, we have a couple of old workstation with Win7 we almost never use at my workplace. I use my portable debian on these machines to practice bash scripting, python and recently docker.
I few thing to consider:
Thanks for the explanation! I looked into it, and it's actually not possible to boot from a USB drive on my school's computers without an admin password 😢. But thanks anyway!
It's fine. "Only 27GB" is hardly too small for the system, even a bloated system wouldn't take that much space.
But if you must have a larger partition I think a reinstall would be easier, resize the partition is possible but because of the encryption not a straight forward thing. I wouldn't bother really.
If LVM isn't somehow mitigating the issue I will do a reinstall.
I have run out of space on / before and it is a huge pain in the ass. I do not need much room for /home on this system so I would prefer to be cautious and avoid problems down the road.
Hopefully I will be able to figure out how to specify this.... maybe a different installer image.
It's two commands to grow the / fs on the fly:
lvextend -L+10G /dev/mycomputer-vg/root
resize2fs /dev/mycomputer-vg/root
So don't worry about it. LVM is great :).
The installer lets you do a custom partition layout.
That is my previous experience. I guess i missed it somehow.
27G is OK. But LVM gives you ability to resize the volume at any time if you need. So don't worry about this. Check df -h, if you have less than 10G used and you are not going to install a lot of very heavy packages (e. g. games with large resources; I mean only deb-packaged ones, not Steam etc. that go into /home), it is highly likely that you will never get in trouble because of / size.
Add a /var partition, boot from some live system, copy over the data, delete it in the root partition after making sure it was copied ok and add the new filesystem to fstab. /var is the only place we that will grow significantly(especially when younuse flatpaks).