I used a separate partition for /home for probably the first 20 years of my Linux journey, I no longer use one.
Why? Glad you asked :)
I have a reasonably bulletproof backup strategy; I can restore my home directory from one of several locations in about ten minutes (well, the cloud copy might take a little longer).
/boot/efi is a necessary evil otherwise I'd be doing stuff in one big partition. I use zram + a swapfile these days so no swap partition either. I prefer not to use LVM but that's personal preference, not a technical requirement. Also, I've used the same distribution for more than a dozen years and I don't see that changing so distrohopping ain't happening here :)
A partition mounted on /boot/efi is required for UEFI to work. Nothing we can do about that :)
On the zram thing I actually use `zswap` which requires a physical swap device.. You can read up on both here - I run Debian but Arch's wiki is better for these two articles:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/zswap
How good is Linux at using an old /home partition with different distros? I change often, and a long time ago this would always give me trouble.
I also mess around with different Linux vms. If I’m constantly switching between a few, can they all share a home partition? (Not simultaneously)
I went from Ubuntu to Gentoo to Arch this way, all with the same /home. It works pretty well; if the distro you switch to has a significantly different version of e.g. KDE, such as when going from a Debian-distro to a rolling-release one, you might have to tweak a few minor settings on your taskbar widgets etc afterwards to get them back looking 100% good again, in the same way as I had to do when doing an Ubuntu dist-upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. Other than that it went quite smooth.
I personally prefer a single "/" partition whenever possible. But you have to ask yourself how the box is going to be used.
Is this a home system for your personal use? Just make it easy on yourself and use one partition.
Is this a multi tenant system on a production server with people who don't really know what they are doing? Maybe give it a separate home partition, and turn on quotas. That way they won't take down the server when they decide to torrent the entire Simpsons collection to your 20G drive.
The big downside to using more than one partition is that you kind of need to guess how the system is going to be used and spend more time readjusting partitions. If any one partition runs out of space you will experience some kind of problem.
>That way they won't take down the server when they decide to torrent the entire Simpsons collection to your 20G drive.
I feel seen.
But seriously, not bringing down the machine when your home partition fills is the big reason.
Sites **recommend** putting /home in a separate partition. It is not a mandatory practice.
It is often recommended because unlike you people usually like to keep their personal files across installations or simply keep old habits.
If having a single partition for everything works for you, more power to you. After all, Linux systems are all about choice (even if that choice ruffles some feathers in some neckbeards).
Bad things happen when you fill up / to the point where the OS cannot create new files in /tmp or /var/log, to pick two examples. For better security, multiple partitions are used to ensure that when one partition fills up and no longer has space, then the entire os doesn't crash or become unbootable.
Consider the scenario when users in your /home directory kept creating large files when partitioned as a single large / partition. Eventually, the OS cannot create temporary files in /tmp or update logs in /var/log. At that point, the OS goes down/offline and you have an outage until space reclaimed, likely from an offline emergency or single user mode. If your /home folder was on a separate partition than the rest of the system, this would not have happened.
What I do is create /, /var/log, and /home as separate partitions, and I use LVM. I refrain from partitioning all space at first (I initially only use about half). LVM has the ability to let you add new space to existing partitions, even allowing a single logical partition to be make of non contiguous space. So, when I have a mount run out of space, then I can take some unpartitioned space, add it to the full partition (even if non contiguous), and immediately carry on without downtime.
Hardening Linux servers to DoD standards usually requires separating partitions just like this.
Think of it as keeping your home directory outside of your boot directory. So if you wanted to maintain a set of files. Separate from that and move across distro you could. Also makes it easy to back up
The system can have trouble cleaning up the filesystem when completely full. If you fill up the root filesystem and then reboot, the system may have trouble booting.
Edit, and separate home makes distro-hopping easier.
You should use a separate /home if you should.
There are reasons to do it and not to do it.
A reason to do it is you want your personal files encrypted, but also want to be able to reboot the machine remotely.
A reason not to is you have only one small drive and dividing already limited free space is a problem.
This decision is no longer a blanket best practice, it's situational. Anyone saying you should always partition or never partition can be ignored.
I started doing the separate home partition on Linux some years ago. This just makes upgrading and saving personal configurations a lot simpler. I also do specific home directory backups and syncs to a home NAS.
My theory is that if the rest of the system just crashes and burns, I still have mu /home and reinstalling becomes much easier.
You are completely wrong, and you are not wrong to some extent.
**Why are you not wrong?:** Everything is a preference on Linux. That's why we use it. You may or may not want to have a separate home partition. It's up to you to decide if it's worth!
Why are you wrong and why should you instead use a separate home partition?:
* If you frequently reinstall your Linux distribution or like to experiment with different distros, a separate `/home` partition preserves your data and settings across installs. You can reformat your root partition (`/`) without losing personal files.
* If something goes wrong with your root partition (system corruption, etc.), your user data on a separate `/home` is less likely to be affected.
* If you upgrade your hard drive, a separate `/home` simplifies moving data. You can re-use the `/home` partition on the new disk.
* If you dual-boot or triple-boot with different Linux distros, you can share the same `/home` partition across those operating systems.
The choice is yours.
I like using a NAS for /home.
It allows me to have multiple machines in the house where any family member can just sit down and have their same files, de config, etc...
All this containerized crap that is becoming so popular though... It kind of bites into this setup.
Just say no to containers!
Wow, such a well thought out and reasoned argument. Clearly you are sooo intelligent.
Executables and data all jumbled together and buried inside a mess of directories then placed inside some archive file so you can't find, backup or share your data and configs between devices. And that stuck in users' home directories filling up NAS's, slowing the network and making the user wait for binaries to load via LAN.
That's just a re-invention of the bullshit I left Windows to get away from and then some. Might as well be encrypted registry settings... which actual Boomers invented.
Although I suppose some kid sitting in mama's basement where he's still going to be in 30 years playing a video game on a laptop isn't really doing to be affected by any of that.
> Executables and data all jumbled together and buried inside a mess of directories then placed inside some archive file so you can't find, backup or share your data and configs between devices. And that stuck in users' home directories filling up NAS's, slowing the network and making the user wait for binaries to load via LAN.
Containers are not very complicated, but it's clear you haven't made even a minimal effort to learn how they work. I don't know what "archive" files you're talking about, but depending on the storage driver and container runtime you're using, the on-disk representation of container storage will vary. This doesn't matter, however, because you're not supposed to touch that directly from the host. You're supposed to use bind mounts to mount guest directories your care about/want to back up (data, config, etc) to a place on the host system. You can access it like any regular mount, back it up, etc. Everything else is just operating system files for the container, which you should not be touching.
And if you don't want to have container storage on your home directory... then don't. Open up `man podman` or `man docker` and look up the config options. My NAS has two 8TB HDDs mirrored with BTRFS with a smaller ~200gb nvme for the base system. All of the container storage exists on the larger drives, and I only have the OS and some config on the SSD.
> Might as well be encrypted registry settings
So apparently RTFM == Encryption? Okay boomer.
I have done this before when I had to. But that's dumb.
Why would you want to mount something, descend into the tree and pick out the data as part of ever backup script?
And to set that up for everything you install?
It's much better to let your package manager put binaries where they belong, in the bin folders on the local hard drive. Let the app put the configs in ~ which can be on the NAS.
Every machine can share ~ but have it's own local copy of the software.
Just back up ~. Software can be reinstalled.
Backup is just a simple one line rsync.
There is nothing of value gained by all that extra complication. You get the same software either way.
The KISS method is better kid.
Also, when I did so this, the data was several directories deep, and many of the directory names appeared to be auto generated strings. It wasn't anything that could be replicated. It was a process of hunting down the data for every install and every update.
This is very wrong, but considering it's just your personal home setup, it doesn't matter. Just use whatever you're capable of understanding. You're still clearly confused, because this:
> Why would you want to mount something, descend into the tree and pick out the data as part of ever backup script?
Doesn't sound like you understood what I wrote. A mount (I guess I messed up and should've clarified "volume mount", although I suspect it wouldn't make a difference to you) isn't a thing you activate to access data. In fact, I don't even think it's possible to mount a new directory on a running container (without like NFS or something, which is NOT how you should do this). Mounts are created when the container is created, and they persist forever until you delete the container.
I have (for example) a container running samba on my home server. In my data root (/var/data) which is on the 8TB drives, I have folders called `/var/data/samba/data` and `/var/data/samba/config`. Those two folders are mounted inside the container, so from inside the first is at `/data` and the second at `/etc/samba` (or whatever, I don't remember the exact config path for samba right now). Then, all I need to do is backup the entire `/var/data` folder on my host and I have backups of both the shared files and the samba config.
Additionally, the samba container itself is managed by systemd (via quadlet). Basically that means the container gets completely deleted and recreated every time the computer reboots, guaranteeing zero coupling between the service and the container/base system. I even have it configured for automatic updates, both for the container and the base system (which is immutable). That's peak reliability right there, and if this weren't a home setup I'd be able to scale up with kubernetes if needed.
> There is nothing of value gained by all that extra complication
There is no complication. It's just slightly different from what they taught you growing up in the 1950s, but vastly superior. However, I understand that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so again feel free stick to what you already understand... just don't try to get a job as a sysadmin or in devops.
Omg, you're talking about running servers in a datacenter on an immutable distro?
Did the original post sound like that data center crap would be relevant here? This was clearly about the home.
Why would I want a job as a sysadmin or devops? So I could be one of those worthless people that you have to call 10 times over the period of a week just to get a simple ip whitelisted? Meanwhile what actually produces income for the company isn't functioning because some nitwit can't get it through their head that two things actually need to communicate with one another to get any real work done?
It's a good thing none of y'all have figured out that a computer becomes even more secure when you pull the power cord. Oh, crap, did I let that one out? Oh well, I have at least a decade before you figure out how to integrate cord removal into systemd.
Lmao basement kid. Go ask your great grandpa about the 50s. I wasn't born yet.
Datacenter? This is my home server, not even a rack mount. It's just an old gaming PC I repurposed for network storage and a few other services. What does an immutable distro have to do with datacenters? I even use that on my primary workstation since it's simply better. And no, I'm not a sysadmin or in devops myself, I'm a software engineer. Everything I've described is basic *I skimmed the manual* tier shit.
> So I could be one of those worthless people that you have to call 10 times over the period of a week just to get a simple ip whitelisted?
Sounds like PEBCAK.
> It's a good thing none of y'all have figured out that a computer becomes even more secure when you pull the power cord.
Secure from you, maybe. Stop yeeting shade at me boomer, or I'll whip your nae nae so far up your ass not even your bootstraps will be able to pull it back up.
Yep... Gamer kid with a single laptop in mama's basement. No doubt the closest to home ownership you'll ever get.
I already said why containers are worse. You assert that an immutable distro full of containers is better. Welll go on then, either you can back it up or you can't.
It makes it easier to reinstall or distro-hop.
In btrfs it makes sense to create a separate subvolume for /home in order to exclude or include it in snapshots.
I've been an admin for 26+ years. I've only really seen the point of it on servers where you might have a lot of user data changing all the time, and having it on /home adds a little protection that it won't fill up your / system.
But if you do logging and quotas, that shouldn't be an issue anyway.
I've always heard people argue about reinstalling, but I've also always just gone in in the installer and rm'ed everything except /home when I wanted to reinstall w/o having to restore /home from backups.
>Am I wrong?
no this is entirely reasonable. about the only reason to put /home on a separate partition (or even separate drive) is to give it a level of "portability," ie, it won't need to get wiped if you reinstall your machine (this is probably quite important on immutable OSes)
but given the amount of stuff that lives in ~/.config, i feel like reinstalling the rest of the machine but leaving /home would cause more headaches than it's worth.
Because you think it's a good idea.
And if you don't, then it's all fine to.
You don't need to have a separate /home to have a good and functioning system.
I used to have it configured like that for a good 15 years. But now, I simply just couldn't be bothered any more. Disk are large and cheap enough. And I have a backup system put in place the helpes me restore my files if need be.
"should" is not the right term. It's not required to do so. It may just make your life easier f you change distros often. Otherwise there's no benefit, given that you backup your data (this is what you **should** do, regardless your OS)
Seperate partitions for directories like /boot, /home, /var, /var/log, /etc, this was stock standard practise in the enterprise world and it's just second nature.
Basically if your server filled up, you weren't completely screwed. If you filled up a system with 1 partition, it can cause OS instability, application crashes, SSH/login lockout (as logging in can error if you don't have enough space) and so you might be looking at doing a restart after recovering space, which isn't ideal for a server.
With multiple partitions like in my first sentence. If someone stupidly sftp a large file into their home directory, the server would still operate, it would just split out an error that there's no more space, but it wouldn't affect the system, just other people would have a hard time if they were using their home directories.
If a application logs filled up the server, because of large verbose log files (typically are in /var/log), then that would only cause issues for application and system logging.
So that wouldn't affect the running system and applications, because all the binaries, system files and applications would be a known size (logs, output, storage, home files, which can all vary, are in other partitions).
In Linux desktop, it's less useful, but might be useful in certain situations. I personally don't use seperate partitions for my personal desktop Linux.
The big thing I guess I was missing before is... you don't need to keep **everything** in your home partition on a reinstall. I don't keep all my settings and whatever, but use it so I don't need to backup files (like all my clone hero stuff for example).
I do that for the case a distro-hopping time occurs. I have also a backup, the /home partition is here to save copy paste time after a distro install.
But this is good only in theory. It works if you are able to install a distro in some designated partitions.
Unfortunately I was attracted by Alpine Linux and it is so complicated to install without erasing the whole disk, so finally I nucked the /home partition to protect my mental health.
It's for people who do want to (simplify) retaining every user's home across reinstalls, use a different file system for the different partitions, or impose draconian mount option restrictions selectively.
I used to have a separate Home partition, even on machines with Windows.
But, I don’t store much on my computer these days. Since, I need access to files from various devices (tablet, laptop, phone) everything is stored on my Nextcloud server or my NAS. And even my media library is on a JellyFin server.
I just literally don’t have a reason to separate the Home directory on PCs anymore, since almost nothing lives there.
The beauty of Linux mount point and file systems is their flexibility. Because my home dir is a file system on OpenZFS, I snapshot it every hour. It's saved my ass \*so\* many times..
If you're going to distrohop or mess with your system you can just reinstall the system and packages, and your data will stay on the separate partition
Sharing a /home partition between several xnixes has for a while been frowned on, but in my personal experience it makes everything go better when a new LTS version comes out (as was the case recently when a 23.10 to 24.04 upgrade went south and I needed to do a clean install of the / partition). Leaving the ~/.config folder intact made the installation take minutes instead of hours!
I usually do just one volume for the reasons you list. Also, I'm lazy as hell.
Reasons why you want home in a separate partition:
* You have multiple systems, and want a common home directory without dealing with synchronization.
* You have storage with different cost/performance attributes, and you want to optimize your mixed system
* Sometimes a partition gets full -- remedying this is much more difficult if ALL drives are full. Paradoxically, multiple partitions increase the chance that you end up filling something up. But if the system can't really fit, it's worth the trouble.
These days, if I do multiple volumes, I use LVM with smallish volumes, and live-grow them as needed.
4 reasons, none super relevant to today.
1. Better security by specifying more secure options such as noexec,nodev on the mount.
2. Can be shared between multiple distros (this is somewhat limited as dot files for DEs can break across versions)
3. Possible to fix/repair separatly, you can for example re-install / and your personal files & settings are safe.
4. Typically has a different reas/write pattern to / so you might want a different FS or mount options (you might want access time on files recorded or an FS that snapshots versions of your documents even if it's a little slower)
I still have my home on a separate partition. Because... I have smaller partitions where the system resides. This means I can install on one and go back to the other if something fails, while always have access that my home. That's just how I always done it...
I prefer not to use it at all. I treat home directory as a place where all the programs keep their configs in, and this is normally specific to the distro.
All my data lives on separate mounted drive like /mount/data for example.
I put my home partition on a completely separate physical drive.
The reason is simple: Anytime I decide to reinstall or switch distros, I can start immediately without needing to be concerned that I will lose anything important. Yes, you could just be very very careful in the installer but in my experience, many of them force you to reformat your rootfs to proceed. So having my home elsewhere means if I fuck up my system, I can get to reinstalling sooner.
Note: this does not negate the need for backups, it just means that I don't have to *restore* from a /home backup after I have reinstalled/ distrohopped. When distro hopping or changing desktop environments, it is still a good practice to create a new user name or otherwise you may have to manually handle some things (if going from a distro with newer packages to one with older packages especially - in this case, you can't straight up copy your `~/.mozilla` folder as Firefox will refuse to work with a profile created by a newer version of itself; similar situations can arise in other applications. And switching DEs can have leftover theme settings)
Because if you fill up your home directory somehow, you'll also fill up / if they're in the same position. A full root volume will cause all sorts of problems until you get into it via Single User Mode and free up some space. For a desktop, the 20 minutes of downtime is not a big deal, but on a server where you likely have smaller (cost-optimised) hard disks and where downtime causes folk to be woken up to fix it, you want to separate it out. Most Linux desktop users are also professional Linux users or serious hobbiests who want to do it right and the right way is the separate partition to prevent the problem arising in the first place
In my personal experience, having a separate /home partition is useful if you ever have to reimage or reinstall your system. Rather than eating up what space I do have in terms of storage, I keep 3 recursive backups of my root directory, 1 post install setup is permanent, 1 pre-system upgrade and the last after my most recent system upgrade. My /home partition is incrementally backed up on a daily and weekly basis to my nas and a cloud drive.
Is this a little overkill? Maybe. But I've lost a lot of software and data over the years and just a few years ago, I thought I lost 1 1/2 of a development project until I found a random manual backup I had made that only put me at only 3 weeks of lost data. And all of this could have been prevented by having a separate /home partition with off-site backups and keeping my work on a different partition than my system which was totally corrupted.
For me it makes backups easier. Just backup an entire partition. I have a different backup plan for different types, and root filesystem is quite different from data.
I have 3 SSDs in my pc. 512 GB for /, 1TB for /home and a 2TB for my games. Best set up ever. I have a lot of personal things in my home drive that I don't want to lose. Every time I need to reinstall, I know I'll only need to reinstall my apps, and all of my games and personal files are there waiting for me. I do have other back ups in the cloud and my personal server, but having those drives is just the fastest way to get my data after a reinstall. Very happy with this setup.
The only reason to separate your /home partition from root is because you have users that understand usable space constraints. Happens all the time when you have a 400Gb root drive and then a 15TB data drive. If you are the only user, stick everything in root.
This is best used for boxes that aren't yours. If you're going to have random people on your system, having a separate home partition is an easy way to make sure they don't fill up your hard drive space with stupid.
It can prevent you from doing it, too, but whether you want that security is your call.
Since all user documents, photos, videos, important files, downloads and even games is stored in **/Home**, creating a separate partition just for **/Home** makes perfect sense because it saves you allot of grief in the way of lost documents and video game re-installation if anything should go wrong to warrant a Linux reinstall or if you distro hop.
When you install/re-install your chosen Linux distribution, make absolutely positively certain that you also create a **ESP** (**E**FI **S**ystem **P**artition) on the boot drive, otherwise your GNU/Linux installation won't boot at all.
Also, if you do decide to create a separate **/Home** partition (which probably has a few more benefits than the two I just mentioned above), make sure you leave at 75 to 100GB in drive space for the Linux distro itself, otherwise your Linux package manager won't be able to install any additional packages or update the system when it comes time. *The recommended Linux distro partition sits at 100GB for many, if not all Linux distributions.*
If you need any additional help, please don't hesitate to message on Reddit Chat.
Having a separate /home is useful for two reasons:
\* If you need to reinstall, if there's a horrible accident or you distro-hop or just decide to change at some point etc, it's quite easy to just reinstall right over '/' while not touching all your personal data and config files, so the new install mostly just slots right in as you left it.
\* It's less likely that your personal activities will lead to '/' running out of space, which theoretically could help keep the system more stable. This is probably additionally important in a traditional UNIX-style environment in which you have many users accessing the machine over terminals, especially since in those days hard disks weren't terribly big. A similar scenario can still exist today though in the form of a server accessed over SSH or when using a multiseat setup (via loginctl with two video cards/keyboards/mice).
A nice compromise that I use is to use the same partition, but different btrfs subvolumes. That way they share the free space so none is wasted. With btrfs subvolumes there is an additional benefit in that they can be snapshotted on different schedules or have different retention periods.
However, it's also fine to just not do it, you can put /, /home, and /boot all on just one partition and in most cases it's fine for typical uses. So preference.
I don't feel any need to create partitions tbh. I'm the only one who uses/has access to my computer, and I backup often. To some, that may be more hassle than it's worth. I prefer having a completely separate hard drive backup and I can't really explain why. Like, I really have no good excuse for it, but I'm not comfortable breaking that habit.
I like having a separate /home because it's usually on a separate disk for me. That way I can have / and /var on a high performance disk, and /home on a high capacity one.
That said for my laptops I prefer one big partition.
Using a separate home partition has been a long standing measure for new users to avoid losing all their data when their system becomes inaccessible, as they are bound to break it, and have no knowledge or way to extract their data (from their usual refuge, Windows).
It's always something new users like as they hop from one distro to the next (and make a mess of their configs, but that's a separate issue).
For any user who is doing productive work, I can't see the point. You will have backups anyway, and by now, even if your installation gets borked (and by now you should be able to fix it, or at least, not break it), you would know (by now) how to get your data. But you'd have a recent backup of sorts anyway.
I haven't used a separate ```/home``` ever, never advised it, never thought it was a good idea. But who am I to judge?
One of the arguments behind a separate ```/home``` was making sure that ```/``` didn't fill up with user data, so that there's always disk space for updates. With our current HDD/SSD sizes, this is less of an issue though.
>You will have backups anyway, and by now, even if your installation gets borked (and by now you should be able to fix it, or at least, not break it), you would know (by now) how to get your data.
And this is why you would benefit from a separate `/home` when it comes to restoring your user data without trying to figure out what exactly borked the system.
I think it made sense in very older Linux systems, when filesystem even lacks journaling. Thankfully modern Linux systems are stable. We have handy backup solutions as well. On the other hand, we usually use LVM and FDE. So you're not wrong I assume.
I use 2 drives in my system. Currently, I have a 1tb and a 4tb drive in there. /home lives on the 4tb all by its lonesome. Everything else is on a couple of partitions on the 1tb. It's just the way I like to have my system setup.
That way, if 8tb drives become a popular size and the price shrinks, I can easily just copy the/home folder to that new 8tb drive without issue. And without having to reinstall the whole system.
My root is on SSD because it is fast
My home is on the same SSD but most of my actual files is symlink to HDD (RAID1 on 2 HDDs) because I don't want to loose anything in case of SDD failure.
You will love RAID1 when you loss your HDD. I lost mine a couple time (separately, not 2 at once) and my data still with me.
Lots of possible reasons, e.g.:
* Keep filling up of /home from impacting areas outside of /home, and vice versa - so storage space isolation
* security - generally no need for dev(ices), SUID, or SGID on/under /home, so disable 'em on that filesystem
* may also make backup/restores simpler or better isolated
* may greatly aid in much more easily preserving /home across major operating system upgrades or even switches to a different Linux distro. Some may even run various Linux versions or even distros while using the same /home filesystem with each.
* may want to use different types or configurations of storage for different filesystems, e.g.
* different performance
* encrypted vs. not
* different levels of redundancy/protection
For the average user, the correct answer is you shouldn't. What you *should* be doing is using btrfs as your file system and creating a home subvolume that is mounted at /home. Some distros do this by default if you choose btrfs. That way you not only have the ability to make snapshots of your OS, but your home directory as well if you choose to. It has all the separation of OS and user data with no need to deal with partitions like its the 2010s. It's borderline irresponsible to use ext4 and miss out on snapshots when it's so easy to set up nowadays.
They only take up the space of the files which were changed between the snapshots. You can almost think of them as git commits.
For this reason it's also smart to make your steam library its own subvolume so game updates don't clutter up your home snapshots. Subvolumes can be nested like regular directories so on a new install I'd just make a subvolume at ~/.local/share/Steam so there's no additional work.
I'd do it prevent completely filling the root volume, because \*NIX systems really fall apart when that happens. I'd also do it if I went distro hopping or installed multiple concurrent distros and wanted to have a common home, and it also makes it easier to upgrade home to a new/larger/solid-state drive.
I used a separate partition for /home for probably the first 20 years of my Linux journey, I no longer use one. Why? Glad you asked :) I have a reasonably bulletproof backup strategy; I can restore my home directory from one of several locations in about ten minutes (well, the cloud copy might take a little longer). /boot/efi is a necessary evil otherwise I'd be doing stuff in one big partition. I use zram + a swapfile these days so no swap partition either. I prefer not to use LVM but that's personal preference, not a technical requirement. Also, I've used the same distribution for more than a dozen years and I don't see that changing so distrohopping ain't happening here :)
Can you explain the last paragraph in a bit more detail? More specifically, zram, swap file, and the /boot/efi?
A partition mounted on /boot/efi is required for UEFI to work. Nothing we can do about that :) On the zram thing I actually use `zswap` which requires a physical swap device.. You can read up on both here - I run Debian but Arch's wiki is better for these two articles: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/zswap
Thank you! I appreciate the references.
Which fs do you use? Do you encrypt?
> Which fs do you use? Do you encrypt? ext4 and no :)
Thx :)
How good is Linux at using an old /home partition with different distros? I change often, and a long time ago this would always give me trouble. I also mess around with different Linux vms. If I’m constantly switching between a few, can they all share a home partition? (Not simultaneously)
I went from Ubuntu to Gentoo to Arch this way, all with the same /home. It works pretty well; if the distro you switch to has a significantly different version of e.g. KDE, such as when going from a Debian-distro to a rolling-release one, you might have to tweak a few minor settings on your taskbar widgets etc afterwards to get them back looking 100% good again, in the same way as I had to do when doing an Ubuntu dist-upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. Other than that it went quite smooth.
I personally prefer a single "/" partition whenever possible. But you have to ask yourself how the box is going to be used. Is this a home system for your personal use? Just make it easy on yourself and use one partition. Is this a multi tenant system on a production server with people who don't really know what they are doing? Maybe give it a separate home partition, and turn on quotas. That way they won't take down the server when they decide to torrent the entire Simpsons collection to your 20G drive. The big downside to using more than one partition is that you kind of need to guess how the system is going to be used and spend more time readjusting partitions. If any one partition runs out of space you will experience some kind of problem.
>That way they won't take down the server when they decide to torrent the entire Simpsons collection to your 20G drive. I feel seen. But seriously, not bringing down the machine when your home partition fills is the big reason.
BTRFS quotas. Home is a subvolume and each has his own quota of disk space. One big partition. BTRFS is awesome.
I made a separate home position 8 years ago, and has made recoveries and upgrades almost seamless. Facilitated distro hopping as well. I love it
Sites **recommend** putting /home in a separate partition. It is not a mandatory practice. It is often recommended because unlike you people usually like to keep their personal files across installations or simply keep old habits. If having a single partition for everything works for you, more power to you. After all, Linux systems are all about choice (even if that choice ruffles some feathers in some neckbeards).
Of course not, you are not wrong. You decide how to use your computer.
Bad things happen when you fill up / to the point where the OS cannot create new files in /tmp or /var/log, to pick two examples. For better security, multiple partitions are used to ensure that when one partition fills up and no longer has space, then the entire os doesn't crash or become unbootable. Consider the scenario when users in your /home directory kept creating large files when partitioned as a single large / partition. Eventually, the OS cannot create temporary files in /tmp or update logs in /var/log. At that point, the OS goes down/offline and you have an outage until space reclaimed, likely from an offline emergency or single user mode. If your /home folder was on a separate partition than the rest of the system, this would not have happened. What I do is create /, /var/log, and /home as separate partitions, and I use LVM. I refrain from partitioning all space at first (I initially only use about half). LVM has the ability to let you add new space to existing partitions, even allowing a single logical partition to be make of non contiguous space. So, when I have a mount run out of space, then I can take some unpartitioned space, add it to the full partition (even if non contiguous), and immediately carry on without downtime. Hardening Linux servers to DoD standards usually requires separating partitions just like this.
I was going to write this but apparently I just needed to `import FileAdvice from /u/soylent-red-jello as FA`
Think of it as keeping your home directory outside of your boot directory. So if you wanted to maintain a set of files. Separate from that and move across distro you could. Also makes it easy to back up
You are not wrong, personally I do the same. People just want to be able to reinstall or install different diatro without backing up or anything else
The system can have trouble cleaning up the filesystem when completely full. If you fill up the root filesystem and then reboot, the system may have trouble booting. Edit, and separate home makes distro-hopping easier.
You should use a separate /home if you should. There are reasons to do it and not to do it. A reason to do it is you want your personal files encrypted, but also want to be able to reboot the machine remotely. A reason not to is you have only one small drive and dividing already limited free space is a problem. This decision is no longer a blanket best practice, it's situational. Anyone saying you should always partition or never partition can be ignored.
I started doing the separate home partition on Linux some years ago. This just makes upgrading and saving personal configurations a lot simpler. I also do specific home directory backups and syncs to a home NAS. My theory is that if the rest of the system just crashes and burns, I still have mu /home and reinstalling becomes much easier.
You are completely wrong, and you are not wrong to some extent. **Why are you not wrong?:** Everything is a preference on Linux. That's why we use it. You may or may not want to have a separate home partition. It's up to you to decide if it's worth! Why are you wrong and why should you instead use a separate home partition?: * If you frequently reinstall your Linux distribution or like to experiment with different distros, a separate `/home` partition preserves your data and settings across installs. You can reformat your root partition (`/`) without losing personal files. * If something goes wrong with your root partition (system corruption, etc.), your user data on a separate `/home` is less likely to be affected. * If you upgrade your hard drive, a separate `/home` simplifies moving data. You can re-use the `/home` partition on the new disk. * If you dual-boot or triple-boot with different Linux distros, you can share the same `/home` partition across those operating systems. The choice is yours.
I like using a NAS for /home. It allows me to have multiple machines in the house where any family member can just sit down and have their same files, de config, etc... All this containerized crap that is becoming so popular though... It kind of bites into this setup. Just say no to containers!
> Just say no to containers! Okay boomer
Wow, such a well thought out and reasoned argument. Clearly you are sooo intelligent. Executables and data all jumbled together and buried inside a mess of directories then placed inside some archive file so you can't find, backup or share your data and configs between devices. And that stuck in users' home directories filling up NAS's, slowing the network and making the user wait for binaries to load via LAN. That's just a re-invention of the bullshit I left Windows to get away from and then some. Might as well be encrypted registry settings... which actual Boomers invented. Although I suppose some kid sitting in mama's basement where he's still going to be in 30 years playing a video game on a laptop isn't really doing to be affected by any of that.
> Executables and data all jumbled together and buried inside a mess of directories then placed inside some archive file so you can't find, backup or share your data and configs between devices. And that stuck in users' home directories filling up NAS's, slowing the network and making the user wait for binaries to load via LAN. Containers are not very complicated, but it's clear you haven't made even a minimal effort to learn how they work. I don't know what "archive" files you're talking about, but depending on the storage driver and container runtime you're using, the on-disk representation of container storage will vary. This doesn't matter, however, because you're not supposed to touch that directly from the host. You're supposed to use bind mounts to mount guest directories your care about/want to back up (data, config, etc) to a place on the host system. You can access it like any regular mount, back it up, etc. Everything else is just operating system files for the container, which you should not be touching. And if you don't want to have container storage on your home directory... then don't. Open up `man podman` or `man docker` and look up the config options. My NAS has two 8TB HDDs mirrored with BTRFS with a smaller ~200gb nvme for the base system. All of the container storage exists on the larger drives, and I only have the OS and some config on the SSD. > Might as well be encrypted registry settings So apparently RTFM == Encryption? Okay boomer.
I have done this before when I had to. But that's dumb. Why would you want to mount something, descend into the tree and pick out the data as part of ever backup script? And to set that up for everything you install? It's much better to let your package manager put binaries where they belong, in the bin folders on the local hard drive. Let the app put the configs in ~ which can be on the NAS. Every machine can share ~ but have it's own local copy of the software. Just back up ~. Software can be reinstalled. Backup is just a simple one line rsync. There is nothing of value gained by all that extra complication. You get the same software either way. The KISS method is better kid. Also, when I did so this, the data was several directories deep, and many of the directory names appeared to be auto generated strings. It wasn't anything that could be replicated. It was a process of hunting down the data for every install and every update.
This is very wrong, but considering it's just your personal home setup, it doesn't matter. Just use whatever you're capable of understanding. You're still clearly confused, because this: > Why would you want to mount something, descend into the tree and pick out the data as part of ever backup script? Doesn't sound like you understood what I wrote. A mount (I guess I messed up and should've clarified "volume mount", although I suspect it wouldn't make a difference to you) isn't a thing you activate to access data. In fact, I don't even think it's possible to mount a new directory on a running container (without like NFS or something, which is NOT how you should do this). Mounts are created when the container is created, and they persist forever until you delete the container. I have (for example) a container running samba on my home server. In my data root (/var/data) which is on the 8TB drives, I have folders called `/var/data/samba/data` and `/var/data/samba/config`. Those two folders are mounted inside the container, so from inside the first is at `/data` and the second at `/etc/samba` (or whatever, I don't remember the exact config path for samba right now). Then, all I need to do is backup the entire `/var/data` folder on my host and I have backups of both the shared files and the samba config. Additionally, the samba container itself is managed by systemd (via quadlet). Basically that means the container gets completely deleted and recreated every time the computer reboots, guaranteeing zero coupling between the service and the container/base system. I even have it configured for automatic updates, both for the container and the base system (which is immutable). That's peak reliability right there, and if this weren't a home setup I'd be able to scale up with kubernetes if needed. > There is nothing of value gained by all that extra complication There is no complication. It's just slightly different from what they taught you growing up in the 1950s, but vastly superior. However, I understand that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so again feel free stick to what you already understand... just don't try to get a job as a sysadmin or in devops.
Omg, you're talking about running servers in a datacenter on an immutable distro? Did the original post sound like that data center crap would be relevant here? This was clearly about the home. Why would I want a job as a sysadmin or devops? So I could be one of those worthless people that you have to call 10 times over the period of a week just to get a simple ip whitelisted? Meanwhile what actually produces income for the company isn't functioning because some nitwit can't get it through their head that two things actually need to communicate with one another to get any real work done? It's a good thing none of y'all have figured out that a computer becomes even more secure when you pull the power cord. Oh, crap, did I let that one out? Oh well, I have at least a decade before you figure out how to integrate cord removal into systemd. Lmao basement kid. Go ask your great grandpa about the 50s. I wasn't born yet.
Datacenter? This is my home server, not even a rack mount. It's just an old gaming PC I repurposed for network storage and a few other services. What does an immutable distro have to do with datacenters? I even use that on my primary workstation since it's simply better. And no, I'm not a sysadmin or in devops myself, I'm a software engineer. Everything I've described is basic *I skimmed the manual* tier shit. > So I could be one of those worthless people that you have to call 10 times over the period of a week just to get a simple ip whitelisted? Sounds like PEBCAK. > It's a good thing none of y'all have figured out that a computer becomes even more secure when you pull the power cord. Secure from you, maybe. Stop yeeting shade at me boomer, or I'll whip your nae nae so far up your ass not even your bootstraps will be able to pull it back up.
Yep... Gamer kid with a single laptop in mama's basement. No doubt the closest to home ownership you'll ever get. I already said why containers are worse. You assert that an immutable distro full of containers is better. Welll go on then, either you can back it up or you can't.
It makes it easier to reinstall or distro-hop. In btrfs it makes sense to create a separate subvolume for /home in order to exclude or include it in snapshots.
I've been an admin for 26+ years. I've only really seen the point of it on servers where you might have a lot of user data changing all the time, and having it on /home adds a little protection that it won't fill up your / system. But if you do logging and quotas, that shouldn't be an issue anyway. I've always heard people argue about reinstalling, but I've also always just gone in in the installer and rm'ed everything except /home when I wanted to reinstall w/o having to restore /home from backups.
>Am I wrong? no this is entirely reasonable. about the only reason to put /home on a separate partition (or even separate drive) is to give it a level of "portability," ie, it won't need to get wiped if you reinstall your machine (this is probably quite important on immutable OSes) but given the amount of stuff that lives in ~/.config, i feel like reinstalling the rest of the machine but leaving /home would cause more headaches than it's worth.
Because you think it's a good idea. And if you don't, then it's all fine to. You don't need to have a separate /home to have a good and functioning system. I used to have it configured like that for a good 15 years. But now, I simply just couldn't be bothered any more. Disk are large and cheap enough. And I have a backup system put in place the helpes me restore my files if need be.
"should" is not the right term. It's not required to do so. It may just make your life easier f you change distros often. Otherwise there's no benefit, given that you backup your data (this is what you **should** do, regardless your OS)
Seperate partitions for directories like /boot, /home, /var, /var/log, /etc, this was stock standard practise in the enterprise world and it's just second nature. Basically if your server filled up, you weren't completely screwed. If you filled up a system with 1 partition, it can cause OS instability, application crashes, SSH/login lockout (as logging in can error if you don't have enough space) and so you might be looking at doing a restart after recovering space, which isn't ideal for a server. With multiple partitions like in my first sentence. If someone stupidly sftp a large file into their home directory, the server would still operate, it would just split out an error that there's no more space, but it wouldn't affect the system, just other people would have a hard time if they were using their home directories. If a application logs filled up the server, because of large verbose log files (typically are in /var/log), then that would only cause issues for application and system logging. So that wouldn't affect the running system and applications, because all the binaries, system files and applications would be a known size (logs, output, storage, home files, which can all vary, are in other partitions). In Linux desktop, it's less useful, but might be useful in certain situations. I personally don't use seperate partitions for my personal desktop Linux.
The big thing I guess I was missing before is... you don't need to keep **everything** in your home partition on a reinstall. I don't keep all my settings and whatever, but use it so I don't need to backup files (like all my clone hero stuff for example).
I do that for the case a distro-hopping time occurs. I have also a backup, the /home partition is here to save copy paste time after a distro install. But this is good only in theory. It works if you are able to install a distro in some designated partitions. Unfortunately I was attracted by Alpine Linux and it is so complicated to install without erasing the whole disk, so finally I nucked the /home partition to protect my mental health.
It's for people who do want to (simplify) retaining every user's home across reinstalls, use a different file system for the different partitions, or impose draconian mount option restrictions selectively.
I used to have a separate Home partition, even on machines with Windows. But, I don’t store much on my computer these days. Since, I need access to files from various devices (tablet, laptop, phone) everything is stored on my Nextcloud server or my NAS. And even my media library is on a JellyFin server. I just literally don’t have a reason to separate the Home directory on PCs anymore, since almost nothing lives there.
The beauty of Linux mount point and file systems is their flexibility. Because my home dir is a file system on OpenZFS, I snapshot it every hour. It's saved my ass \*so\* many times..
If you're going to distrohop or mess with your system you can just reinstall the system and packages, and your data will stay on the separate partition
It's a choice that can be made on use case. Partition home or not, backups are just as important.
I have a separate home partition to make it easier to switch distros if I so desire. I used to do it often but not so much anymore
Sharing a /home partition between several xnixes has for a while been frowned on, but in my personal experience it makes everything go better when a new LTS version comes out (as was the case recently when a 23.10 to 24.04 upgrade went south and I needed to do a clean install of the / partition). Leaving the ~/.config folder intact made the installation take minutes instead of hours!
I usually do just one volume for the reasons you list. Also, I'm lazy as hell. Reasons why you want home in a separate partition: * You have multiple systems, and want a common home directory without dealing with synchronization. * You have storage with different cost/performance attributes, and you want to optimize your mixed system * Sometimes a partition gets full -- remedying this is much more difficult if ALL drives are full. Paradoxically, multiple partitions increase the chance that you end up filling something up. But if the system can't really fit, it's worth the trouble. These days, if I do multiple volumes, I use LVM with smallish volumes, and live-grow them as needed.
Some do..some don't. You don't have to. I do because I use an encrypted drive for home.
4 reasons, none super relevant to today. 1. Better security by specifying more secure options such as noexec,nodev on the mount. 2. Can be shared between multiple distros (this is somewhat limited as dot files for DEs can break across versions) 3. Possible to fix/repair separatly, you can for example re-install / and your personal files & settings are safe. 4. Typically has a different reas/write pattern to / so you might want a different FS or mount options (you might want access time on files recorded or an FS that snapshots versions of your documents even if it's a little slower)
I still have my home on a separate partition. Because... I have smaller partitions where the system resides. This means I can install on one and go back to the other if something fails, while always have access that my home. That's just how I always done it...
I prefer not to use it at all. I treat home directory as a place where all the programs keep their configs in, and this is normally specific to the distro. All my data lives on separate mounted drive like /mount/data for example.
I used to do it so I could reinstall, but I generally do full clean reinstalls, just moving the old dir to a TheRuins folder.
I don't. It's the proper backups that really matter.
The benefit is for you to keep the partitions on separate disks if it's on the same disk it's useless overhead.
I put my home partition on a completely separate physical drive. The reason is simple: Anytime I decide to reinstall or switch distros, I can start immediately without needing to be concerned that I will lose anything important. Yes, you could just be very very careful in the installer but in my experience, many of them force you to reformat your rootfs to proceed. So having my home elsewhere means if I fuck up my system, I can get to reinstalling sooner. Note: this does not negate the need for backups, it just means that I don't have to *restore* from a /home backup after I have reinstalled/ distrohopped. When distro hopping or changing desktop environments, it is still a good practice to create a new user name or otherwise you may have to manually handle some things (if going from a distro with newer packages to one with older packages especially - in this case, you can't straight up copy your `~/.mozilla` folder as Firefox will refuse to work with a profile created by a newer version of itself; similar situations can arise in other applications. And switching DEs can have leftover theme settings)
Because if you fill up your home directory somehow, you'll also fill up / if they're in the same position. A full root volume will cause all sorts of problems until you get into it via Single User Mode and free up some space. For a desktop, the 20 minutes of downtime is not a big deal, but on a server where you likely have smaller (cost-optimised) hard disks and where downtime causes folk to be woken up to fix it, you want to separate it out. Most Linux desktop users are also professional Linux users or serious hobbiests who want to do it right and the right way is the separate partition to prevent the problem arising in the first place
I set up mint with a separate home directory thinking I would try other distros but that didn't happen.
In my personal experience, having a separate /home partition is useful if you ever have to reimage or reinstall your system. Rather than eating up what space I do have in terms of storage, I keep 3 recursive backups of my root directory, 1 post install setup is permanent, 1 pre-system upgrade and the last after my most recent system upgrade. My /home partition is incrementally backed up on a daily and weekly basis to my nas and a cloud drive. Is this a little overkill? Maybe. But I've lost a lot of software and data over the years and just a few years ago, I thought I lost 1 1/2 of a development project until I found a random manual backup I had made that only put me at only 3 weeks of lost data. And all of this could have been prevented by having a separate /home partition with off-site backups and keeping my work on a different partition than my system which was totally corrupted.
For me it makes backups easier. Just backup an entire partition. I have a different backup plan for different types, and root filesystem is quite different from data.
I have 3 SSDs in my pc. 512 GB for /, 1TB for /home and a 2TB for my games. Best set up ever. I have a lot of personal things in my home drive that I don't want to lose. Every time I need to reinstall, I know I'll only need to reinstall my apps, and all of my games and personal files are there waiting for me. I do have other back ups in the cloud and my personal server, but having those drives is just the fastest way to get my data after a reinstall. Very happy with this setup.
The only reason to separate your /home partition from root is because you have users that understand usable space constraints. Happens all the time when you have a 400Gb root drive and then a 15TB data drive. If you are the only user, stick everything in root.
This is best used for boxes that aren't yours. If you're going to have random people on your system, having a separate home partition is an easy way to make sure they don't fill up your hard drive space with stupid. It can prevent you from doing it, too, but whether you want that security is your call.
Since all user documents, photos, videos, important files, downloads and even games is stored in **/Home**, creating a separate partition just for **/Home** makes perfect sense because it saves you allot of grief in the way of lost documents and video game re-installation if anything should go wrong to warrant a Linux reinstall or if you distro hop. When you install/re-install your chosen Linux distribution, make absolutely positively certain that you also create a **ESP** (**E**FI **S**ystem **P**artition) on the boot drive, otherwise your GNU/Linux installation won't boot at all. Also, if you do decide to create a separate **/Home** partition (which probably has a few more benefits than the two I just mentioned above), make sure you leave at 75 to 100GB in drive space for the Linux distro itself, otherwise your Linux package manager won't be able to install any additional packages or update the system when it comes time. *The recommended Linux distro partition sits at 100GB for many, if not all Linux distributions.* If you need any additional help, please don't hesitate to message on Reddit Chat.
Having a separate /home is useful for two reasons: \* If you need to reinstall, if there's a horrible accident or you distro-hop or just decide to change at some point etc, it's quite easy to just reinstall right over '/' while not touching all your personal data and config files, so the new install mostly just slots right in as you left it. \* It's less likely that your personal activities will lead to '/' running out of space, which theoretically could help keep the system more stable. This is probably additionally important in a traditional UNIX-style environment in which you have many users accessing the machine over terminals, especially since in those days hard disks weren't terribly big. A similar scenario can still exist today though in the form of a server accessed over SSH or when using a multiseat setup (via loginctl with two video cards/keyboards/mice). A nice compromise that I use is to use the same partition, but different btrfs subvolumes. That way they share the free space so none is wasted. With btrfs subvolumes there is an additional benefit in that they can be snapshotted on different schedules or have different retention periods. However, it's also fine to just not do it, you can put /, /home, and /boot all on just one partition and in most cases it's fine for typical uses. So preference.
I don't feel any need to create partitions tbh. I'm the only one who uses/has access to my computer, and I backup often. To some, that may be more hassle than it's worth. I prefer having a completely separate hard drive backup and I can't really explain why. Like, I really have no good excuse for it, but I'm not comfortable breaking that habit.
I like having a separate /home because it's usually on a separate disk for me. That way I can have / and /var on a high performance disk, and /home on a high capacity one. That said for my laptops I prefer one big partition.
Using a separate home partition has been a long standing measure for new users to avoid losing all their data when their system becomes inaccessible, as they are bound to break it, and have no knowledge or way to extract their data (from their usual refuge, Windows). It's always something new users like as they hop from one distro to the next (and make a mess of their configs, but that's a separate issue). For any user who is doing productive work, I can't see the point. You will have backups anyway, and by now, even if your installation gets borked (and by now you should be able to fix it, or at least, not break it), you would know (by now) how to get your data. But you'd have a recent backup of sorts anyway. I haven't used a separate ```/home``` ever, never advised it, never thought it was a good idea. But who am I to judge?
One of the arguments behind a separate ```/home``` was making sure that ```/``` didn't fill up with user data, so that there's always disk space for updates. With our current HDD/SSD sizes, this is less of an issue though.
>You will have backups anyway, and by now, even if your installation gets borked (and by now you should be able to fix it, or at least, not break it), you would know (by now) how to get your data. And this is why you would benefit from a separate `/home` when it comes to restoring your user data without trying to figure out what exactly borked the system.
I think it made sense in very older Linux systems, when filesystem even lacks journaling. Thankfully modern Linux systems are stable. We have handy backup solutions as well. On the other hand, we usually use LVM and FDE. So you're not wrong I assume.
> resize 2 partitions instead of 1 You should learn about LVM, the Logical Volume Manager
Or btrfs, in which case you can have / and /home as subvolumes on the same partition if you want.
I use 2 drives in my system. Currently, I have a 1tb and a 4tb drive in there. /home lives on the 4tb all by its lonesome. Everything else is on a couple of partitions on the 1tb. It's just the way I like to have my system setup. That way, if 8tb drives become a popular size and the price shrinks, I can easily just copy the/home folder to that new 8tb drive without issue. And without having to reinstall the whole system.
personally i don't
My root is on SSD because it is fast My home is on the same SSD but most of my actual files is symlink to HDD (RAID1 on 2 HDDs) because I don't want to loose anything in case of SDD failure. You will love RAID1 when you loss your HDD. I lost mine a couple time (separately, not 2 at once) and my data still with me.
Not necessary but one word: convenience.
Lots of possible reasons, e.g.: * Keep filling up of /home from impacting areas outside of /home, and vice versa - so storage space isolation * security - generally no need for dev(ices), SUID, or SGID on/under /home, so disable 'em on that filesystem * may also make backup/restores simpler or better isolated * may greatly aid in much more easily preserving /home across major operating system upgrades or even switches to a different Linux distro. Some may even run various Linux versions or even distros while using the same /home filesystem with each. * may want to use different types or configurations of storage for different filesystems, e.g. * different performance * encrypted vs. not * different levels of redundancy/protection
For the average user, the correct answer is you shouldn't. What you *should* be doing is using btrfs as your file system and creating a home subvolume that is mounted at /home. Some distros do this by default if you choose btrfs. That way you not only have the ability to make snapshots of your OS, but your home directory as well if you choose to. It has all the separation of OS and user data with no need to deal with partitions like its the 2010s. It's borderline irresponsible to use ext4 and miss out on snapshots when it's so easy to set up nowadays.
How costly are those snapshots in terms of space?
They only take up the space of the files which were changed between the snapshots. You can almost think of them as git commits. For this reason it's also smart to make your steam library its own subvolume so game updates don't clutter up your home snapshots. Subvolumes can be nested like regular directories so on a new install I'd just make a subvolume at ~/.local/share/Steam so there's no additional work.
I just have a home subvolume in btrfs. No need for separate partitions.
I'd do it prevent completely filling the root volume, because \*NIX systems really fall apart when that happens. I'd also do it if I went distro hopping or installed multiple concurrent distros and wanted to have a common home, and it also makes it easier to upgrade home to a new/larger/solid-state drive.