Hi all,

There are a million different ways to set up your computer. Preserving
those choices is why we use Linux instead of windoz and mac. In a
recent thread people have expressed love or disdain for various setups.

Let me brag about my setup, which is probably wrong for most of you,
but it sure works well for me...

My root drive is a little SSD that hosts the /usr and /etc trees. So
when I run gnumeric, it pops up quickly because it comes off the SSD.
Most other stuff is mountpoints.

Of course /home is a mountpoint. But because I don't like mixing
valuable data with config info and cache and who knows what else, I
have two more important data trees: /d and /s. The distinction is that
the stuff on /d is stuff I woudn't worry too much if a badguy got it,
whereas the stuff no /s would be a big problem if someone else got it.
When I take a laptop to meetings, it usually has a copy of /d but
not /s. The /home, /d and /s mountpoints are mounted to spinning rust,
because they hold *a lot* of data.

On $PATH I have a directory called /d/bats with all my homegrown
shellscripts and executables. I think some of you might be catching on
that this system is older than my Linux usage: This directory was once
D:/bats, and held all the DOS batch files I'd made.

My machine has 16 GB RAM, so I can run VMs and lots of Chromium pages
without stopping the machine. And, as mentioned, the fact that / and
therefore /usr are on SSD makes this machine quick.

This machine is about 4 years old. Every other machine I've ever had,
by the time it reached 4 years old (usually 3), was so slow and pokey
that it needed replacement. But this machine works fine for my needs in
90% of its tasks.

I don't run LVM because I don't need yet one more level of abstraction.
I don't yet run drive encryption, but may start. I won't be encrypting
anything on the root drive, so I can boot up to a useable state and
then unencrypt various partitions.

It's not for everyone, but it's working well for me.

SteveT

Steve Litt
November 2018 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical
Troubleshooting Brand new, second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr