On Sun, Nov 09, 2025 at 04:11:20AM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> o1bigtenor via Dng said on Sat, 8 Nov 2025 13:40:12 -0600
>
> >Is usrmerge a step on the way to having only two partitions
> >(ie / and /home)?
>
> The only three partitions I'd recommend are swap, /, and /boot. Why in
> the world would anybody want to make little fixed-size partitions, in
> today's world of huge disks?

Why? well, they no longer need to be little. But it is useful
to make them separate.

Occasinally a runaway program can fill disk space. This makes
a lot of activities impossible because they rely on there being
disk space available. But with separate partitions the damage
is linited.

I have once filled up /tmp and the shell could no longer perform
all of its features, which meant that a lot of scripts no longer
worked. But I could avoid those and get soe things done anyway.
Certainy enough to investigate and remedy the problem.

Roughly speaking, having separate, limited-size partitions
restricts the consequences of resource exhaustion and gives you
opportunities for recovery you might not have otherwise.

Of course, using LVM partitions gives you some flexibility as well
as these advantages.

-- hendrik