experimenting with my 2014 macbook pro and several linux distros (xubuntu, mint, fedora)

So far I have 8 partitions:

  • 1 EFI for grub,
  • 1 hfs+ (Linux HFS+ ESP) for OCLP, I think,
  • 1 apfs for the macOS 14 I cannot boot,
  • 2 ext4 for xubuntu and mint
  • 1 brfs for fedora (so it cannot be ext4?)
  • 2 unallocated ones, because I deleted systems I don’t want.

I use gparted: the 2 unallocated sections are separated. Is this a problem?

How many partitions are too many for this machine? 247 GiB storage and 7.66 GiB memory.

After I’m done experimenting and keep the 2 to 3 operative systems I like, should I wipe the notebook, create the 2 to 3 partitions I’m going to need and reinstall? Or would it be better to simply delete the partitions I don’t want?

  • @ricecake
    7•3 months ago

    A partition for each thing you might want to change the size of is my rule, or to be able to wipe independently of the others.

    I usually prefer lvm over actual partitions, since it does a better job letting me think about volumes as opposed to devices.

    Boot gets a partition because it’s basically required. Home gets one so I can reinstall without mucking things up. The database directory gets one for similar reasons, a d because I might need to scale it up. The system itself gets one because it’s most likely to get wiped or need more space.
    Most of these are actually lvm volumes.