On 5/7/22 11:28, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| OK, I'll probably go with Fedora-36/KDE when it comes out.
I use Fedora almost always. I don't use KDE. I don't know if Fedora users use KDE often enough to be sure that it is well-teste I'm used to KDE. At work, most use GNOME. Since "terminal" and "file manager" are the only things I use from desktop, any desktop is okay.
| I usually don't partition my disks. I use the whole disk. Boot disk is the | only one that has (one) partition in MBR. So, when Fedora talked about going | UEFI exclusively, I looked elsewhere. Now, they are dropping that idea. | https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=14569
Why do you want MBR? I switched to UEFI many years ago. Generally it is a win.
I have bad experience with UEFI. You can't just move the disk to a new motherboard, and boot.
Reading more carefully, I think that you mean that you have GPT partitioning on all your disks, with only one partition on all disks except for the one you boot from. On your boot disk, you have a /boot partition and a single / partition for the rest of the disk. /boot appears to be MBR to GRUB but GPT to the running system (a very useful hack)
No, my current boot drive is 500GB MBR, with one partition and no swap. Just /dev/sda1. I used to have /, /boot, /home, and swap partitions. I now put everything into /. So, to upgrade, I usually - move /home and /etc to /old - remove all others - install new distro - restore from /old/etc and /old/home For UEFI, I would need 2 partitions (/ and /boot/efi) at minimum. Some distro adds /boot and /home. So, 4 partitions. I don't know - if UEFI came about to support these multi partitions, or - if distro are simply taking advantage of GPT. When disk fails, it rarely fails by partitions. It fails as whole disk. So, partitioning isn't as useful as it sounds. All other disks are raw disks in raid1 multi-disk btrfs. So, it uses /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd, ... as whole, not /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, ...
UEFI Losses:
- more magic (i.e. a little more complex). But fewer hacks.
- You can only run x86-64 OSes on an X86-64 UEFI. (With MBR you can boot 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit OSes.)
- very old machines don't have UEFI. (Surely your computer has UEFI firmware.)
- you have to have an ESP (EFI System Partition) and it has to be VFAT so it pretty much has to be a separate partition from the partition(s) holding your data and system. But it need not be very large -- 500M is plenty. This is much less of a burden than your /boot.
UEFI Wins:
- booting becomes less fragile
- supporting more than 4 partitions is less hairy
- allowing multiple OSes on one drive is a lot easier
- UEFI is a well-tested path, both for the hardware and the OS.
- considerable hardware no longer has an MBR option
- firmware updates can often be managed by Linux.
- many manufacturers provide diagnostics as .efi programs.
- Secure Boot. Why not?
Partitioning:
I do a bit more partitioning than you do.
I have a separate /home. That means that I can replace the OS and leave the users' files.
The only exception is on machines with tiny disks: partitioning a 32G eMMC on a netbook is almost guaranteed to strand precious space in the wrong partition.
Each OS that I intend to boot needs its own partition(s). I often have dual boot Fedora / Windows, even though I rarely use Windows. Sometimes I have two versions of Fedora, each on its own / partition. Sometimes I have Fedora and Ubuntu.
I often have a swap partition.
Modern disks are so large that I often leave space unassigned to a partition. That lets me decide what to do with it when I need it. It should also contribute to the longevity of SSDs (effectively this is massive over-provisioning).