Quoting Alessandro Selli (alessandroselli@???):

>  Can you name me one distribution other than Red Hat (which in
> fact is not a desktop-friendly distribution) that does not allow one to
> "do their own partition setup"?

I'm curious, Alessandro: Is RHEL now completely hostile to custom
filesystem setup? A long time ago (like maybe RHEL3), Red Hat built
into its Anaconda installer an ncurses-oriented 'guided' partitioning
tool that was guilty of both concealing information (suppressed display
of any extended partition, though logical partitions within it were
displayed) and also unacceptably overrode the installing admin's
judgement (e.g., rearranging following its own criteria the filesystems
to be created). First time I encountered the latter misbehaviour, I
exercised my vocubulary in several languages on the topics of theology
and biology, further commented 'Sod _this_ for a lark', cancelled out of
that subscreen, switched to Ctrl-Alt-F2, and used /sbin/fdisk instead.

Just offhand, I'm betting that a similar approach may still be fruitful,
though I've not needed to deal with the darned thing in quite a while.

Years later, based partly on that lesson, I started leaning towards a
preference for using a best-of-breed live distro for partitioning and
mkfs'ing all of my filesystems _before_ using the desired distro
installer. FWIW, I found the Siduction live CD ideal for this purpose.
(Siduction is the surviving fork of an innovative distro, Sidux, that
was a quarterly CD ISO release based on Debian Sid + stabilisation
packages.) My thought is: If you find a maintenance bootable image
that is reliably perfect for filesystem creation/layout, maybe you
should rely on it. Sometimes, specialised tools justify themselves.

>   And again, I do get the technical reasons that have datacenter and
> cluster sysadmins prefer a merged filesystem....

FWIW, I suspect that the premise (from an upstream poster) is pretty
much rubbish, analogue to Usenet's infamous 'the lurkers support me
in e-mail' rejoider, and of null information value either way.

I suspect the aforementioned datacentre and cluster admins are the same
lunkheads who think default Docker configurations are the right way to
build Internet infrastructure.