With the new computer and the newer Microsoft Windows updates they have really jam packed their OS with bloat and spyware. That being said I have no idea what I’m doing with Linux, need help with where to start.? What are some general tips? I understand there’s a lot of prebuilt Linux distributions or something what are some first timer friendly ones? Really any help is appreciated because the biggest barrier to entry is the perceived difficulty of actually doing it.
I swear to God this is my biggest gripe with Linux, not being able to choose where stuff gets installed. Like yeah cool I want to have the OS on a SSD but that doesn’t mean I also want my packages to go to it too, the HDD is for that
Is that really an issue, though? My entire install is only 38GB (not including swap), and I’ve never even gotten close to filling the root partition.
If you really want to, you could mount the HDD to
/usror make symlinks pointing to a directory on the HDD.I am more concerned about the life of the SSD than it filling up. I’d like to minimize the amounts of write operations and since I have a perfectly capable HDD that doesn’t suffer from such a thing I want to offload all of that work.
Also thanks for mentioning mounting, completely forgot about that and it might actually be easier to do
I wouldn’t worry too much about SSD wear. It’s not nearly as big an issue for PCs, and wear balancing can stretch that ~10000-write lifetime to many years, especially if most of the SSD is empty. I bought my oldest SSD around 2015 and it still works perfectly. SMART barely reports any errors.
If you want frequently written files to be on the HDD, start with
/var,/run, and~/.cache. Those files are likely far bigger contributors to wear than anything inside/usr.@Ozzy @rtxn I just thought of this, could one, create symbolic links that point to /lib (for ex.) to “repoint” the directory a package gets installed to?
Not sure if this would work, but was curious if someone’s attempted it before.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing too, technically if we would recreate the file structure on the second drive, move everything there and set up soft links to those folders instead it might work? I need to try it out in a vm
@Ozzy Exactly what I was thinking. Kind of a PiTA if everyone needed to do that, but maybe an excuse to throw up an open-source script on github for it.
Some directories can be moved, but you risk messing up your boot process if /lib, /etc, /bin, /sbin, and /dev are not on your root partition. Having /usr on a separate partition is sort-of possible, but even on Gentoo that’s an uncommon configuration, and I’d expect less flexible distros not to allow it at all. /var, /opt, /root, and /home can be wherever, though.
It may be possible to put only selected files in your /lib and so on, and then mount another partition on a different drive on top of the minimal one late in the boot process, or even to stopgap things with a carefully-designed initramfs, but I think you’d be looking at some trial and error (and make it more difficult to update basic system packages).
Also, defining what is “just the OS” on Linux is not as easy as you may think. The smallest possible configuration that will get you a running system is a Linux kernel + busybox (a set of cut-down system tools that includes a simple init system, a shell, and a basic device manager). Most of what your distro packages is not part of the OS, strictly speaking—it’s optional add-ons that the people making the distro think most users will find useful.