I just got a new laptop and installed Linux on it. I mainly run OpenSUSE.
Getting full encryption on both was a bit of a challenge and I had no idea what I’m doing. Will having the swap partition in the middle break things? Did I really need so many partitions (Mint and OpenSUSE don’t show up in eachother’s boot menu)?
I’m probably not gonna change this layout (because reinstallation seems like a pain) unless the swap partition’s position is a problem. I’m just curious how many mistakes I made.
EDIT: I’m not upgrading my drive capacity. I do not need it.
I would create another couple of efi partitions, just to confuse attackers more
Why don’t you delete windows
I am afraid that in the future something I need will require Windows 11. Whether that be interacting with the government or maybe if I go back to university.
Can’t speak to your exact machine but nowadays the license tends to be tied to the hardware.
If you are capable of manual partitioning then you should be able to reinstall Windows quickly if needed.
Problem for me is, I don’t know how to install windows. Especially onto a partition of 70gb instead of whole disk
I guess I could reinstall Windows, I really hate the idea of running the Windows 11 installer though.
VM might be enough
Depends whether they’ll start using TPM in combination with kernel-level anti-cheat to ensure you don’t use AI in an exam or something. I don’t know what the future holds and barely understand what a TPM does.
At some point if they have ridiculous restrictions one might consider … doing the test in person, in a room provided by the actual school or that THEY provide the hardware.
Anyway IMHO the bigger point is that a lot of my own inaction (I won’t speak for others) came from fear of problems that rarely, if ever, materialized. I would recommend to move on and if the problem does actually arise then consider solutions at that point.
I uninstalled Windows on my SSD years ago (despite paying for it, forced by OEM deals), didn’t regret it once. In fact, I wear it as a “badge of honor” with pride. When someone tells me I “have” to use Windows for whatever reason, I tell them I can’t and that usually leads to interesting conversations.
Yeah I’ll probably try to work out how to back it up. Don’t want to have to give Microsoft money though so I’ll clone it and store it on a USB.
I imagine legally speaking, if you care for that, the license key is enough but depends on your jurisdiction, if you care for this kind of things. That said as the pace OS deprecates doubt it’d be useful.
Lost my license key anyway. Goodbye forever Windows 11.
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Can emulate TPM
also kernel level anti cheat is for video games
Virt-manager can run windows in a vm
Looks like it’s included in Ubuntu too, so I think I’ll use that (I’m changing to Kubuntu after yet again needing to find missing packages).
Is there any reason? You’re effectively wasting half the drive by using that space for OSes you almost never use.
If you ever happen to need Windows, which I don’t see happening as you yourself can’t imagine an actual use case, you can just go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer or maybe use your phone.
As for Mint, do you just have it to experiment with? If you’re just trying to try out other distros, a virtual machine or even live USBs are much easier ways to quickly try out new systems without having to clear actual partitions.
If you had much more storage then sure, waste some of it, but you’re really gonna be missing that 120gb if you use your computer for… basically anything.
The order of the partitions basically doesn’t matter at this point – I think having a boot partition first used to be important for MBR schemes but I’m pretty sure in the UEFI era you can have them in whatever order. As others have mentioned, you could combine your EFI partitions, but doing so to an already installed system is slightly complex. You also could shrink some of your EFI and boot partitions, I’m not sure of the recommended sizes off the top of my head but I think they could be smaller. On the other hand, your swap partition should probably be bigger – making it the same size as your RAM is a good rule of thumb and will enable hibernation (I think).
Yep, gonna clone and delete Windows 11.
Library might work.
I’m using Mint for sensitive matters, I want to keep it separate from my daily driver.
I’ll basically just be using this laptop for web-browsing.
I don’t really use hibernation. I’ll need to enable swap encryption though.
If you don’t plan to expand the swap partition, I would recommend just deleting the swap partition – you could either make it a new ext4 and use LVM to combine it with the shared storage, or if you’re going to combine your EFI partitions you could grow your Mint partition to include both the SUSE EFI and the swap partition – and using a swap file instead, as another commenter mentioned. You honestly really don’t need swap space regardless with 16gb of RAM if you’re really just using this to run a web browser, but you can easily set up a swap file if you want one.
Some of the responses I got were about how the swap partition is useless, and someone else replied to them that they were wrong. I haven’t responded to these people because I don’t yet understand who’s right. I’ll use a swap file or just no swap altogether once I check for myself if the anti-swap people are nutters. I assume temporary files aren’t saved to swap but instead to temp so I can’t imagine what it’s used for on an SSD.
I found yet another thing I’d need to manually install with OpenSUSE Leap (and at that point I may aswell use Arch with all it’s documentation glory). I didn’t have any of these issues with Ubuntu-based distros so I’m doing a fresh install with Kubuntu.
I’m gonna LVM it with two distros and a shared data partition.
You have swap, which is pointless in this day and age, and will just burn a hole in the flash and delay the OOM killer doing its work. Look at ntfsresize to shrink that Windows partition down to the minimum. Then maybe image the partitions and obliterate them from the SSD. Use LVM instead to give yourself future flexibility. 1TB NVMe SSDs are so cheap these days they might as well put them in boxes of cereal.
Swap on an ssd greatly accelerates the time before the drive fails. I would recommend removing it.
I don’t believe this is true, but since I don’t need hibernation I’m going with a swap file anyway.
Solid state drives have a finite number of write cycles. Using a portion of it for random access MASSSIVELY increases the amount of write cycles that are performed in regular operation.
Swap and RAM are not the same thing. Swap is not written to as carelessly as RAM.
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Looked it up and that’s wrong. An SSD doesn’t wear-level based on the partitions but on a firmware level.
Yep, you’re right. I’ll delete my previous comment. Seems like my info was like 15+ years out of date.
