default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Les Mikesell]

Benny Amorsen wrote:

>>>> What about a separate /usr, or a separate /var?  These can both be
>>>> quite beneficial,
>>> What are the benefits of separate /usr and /var? I can think of two:
>>> 1) one partition getting full doesn't affect the rest of the system
>>> 2) hard links aren't possible across partitions
>>>
>>> Are there others? Disk quota could help with 1), and is 2) really a
>>> great benefit on the desktop?
>> The big one is that when you reinstall (which every fedora user should
>> have done 8 times already with no end in sight), you can tell the
>> installer not to format your /home partition and keep your own data.
> 
> I haven't actually tried reinstalling. My current laptop was installed
> around FC3.

And is the reason for that because you didn't want to lose your own work 
in /home?

> 
> Anyway, I was talking about /usr and /var, not about /home.

/var can have substantial write activity in some scenarios (busy mail or 
database server, or anything with a lot of logging) and it can improve 
performance to put it on a separate disk drive (not just a separate 
partition) to eliminate head contention with other work.  But this 
wouldn't apply to a typical single-user workstation setup.  There's not 
much reason for /usr to be separate from anything else these days except 
that in theory you can mount it read-only or nfs-mount it, sharing among 
identical machines.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com