| From: o1bigtenor via talk <talk@gtalug.org> Note: I am only an amateur sysadmin. | One of my linux mentors, who calls himself a linux dinosaur (started on | a System V on a pc) Picky picky: System V isn't Linux. It's UNIX. I first used UNIX seriously with 4th or 5th Edition in 1975. But I first became strongly interested in 1974 from reading "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" in the Communications of the ACM. I think that a number of GTALUG folks used Linux before I did. I switched my desktop from Solaris on SPARC to Linux about 1997 (I played with Linux before that). | even advocates for a separate partition for /var/log | to forestall any software issues choking off disk usage. Good point. What causes disk-full events for you? If you can isolate them to separate filesystems, that's good. Here are the ones that have hit me: - too many log messages (/var/log). That can easily be cured by log system settings. - too much email (/var/spool) - too many saved update packages (due to a PackageKit / dnf bug) (/var/cache) - too many packages installed (/) - too many core dumps (/var/spool/abrt) A firefox dump usually takes 4GiB or so on my system. HDDs are so big and cheap these days that the simplest solution is to wildly over-allocate for each partition. Unfortunately, SSDs are so much faster that you ought to use them and their capacity costs more. I use both. I haven't bothered to put any problematic directories on the HDD. | One of my frustrations with linux has | been that it can be very difficult to find clear understandable information | on many parts of the system. Much of the documentation seems to be | written for someone who is well versed in things and is looking for a clue | or a reminder on 'how things work'. There are other challenges - Linux is very large. Mostly things get added and very little gets deleted. (When I first used UNIX, the largest RAM was 256KiB. It ran off a disk that was 2.5MB. You can bet is was simpler.) - Documentation gets out of date. - Linux is very general-purpose. How you should set it up depends on many things. Consider the difference between Linux embedded in a home router and Linux running a supercomputer. (Most routers, smartphones, tablets, supercomputers, websites, cloud systems, etc. run Linux.) - each distro is a different. Each installation can be different. One key to understanding Linux is to understand its anatomy. Then you can study the organs of interest in isolation.