Recommended Partitions Scheme setup in general for linux/manjaro?

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Hi, I’m wondering what is the best general partitioning scheme set up when you do a fresh install of Manjaro.

Let’s say I have a 1TB m.2 drive. That gives me around 930GB of usable space.
32GB of RAM

would you recommend going with the default installation setup if you choose to wipe and erase disk? (everything on the root partition)

Or

Would you partition it yourself? and how would you do it?

Same example as above but manual partitioning.
i.e.
1GB for bootloader (is this enough?)
300GB for /root (is this enough or too much?)
615GB for /home
14GB for /swap with hibernation or should I go with a swap file? ( is swap needed or not?)

Will the second example here work with full disk encryption from the installation menu? how would you do it?

I will be running VMs of a separate drive, I do mostly photo and video work, but trying to learn some languages for programing/pen-testing. bu all my photo software only runs on windows so that’s why I would have to use WMs and hopefully can do GPU passthrough when I can afford another GPU.

This is a bonus question:

is it possible to have 2 separate drives one with Manjaro and one with windows and have only one bootloader? So I don’t have to press F11 every time I start the system to choose which OS I want to load? (turn on the machine and a bootloader pops up where I can choose Manjaro or Windows)

Thank you for any and all of y’all inputs

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Hello @av8r :wink:

In your case, I would recommend BTRFS. You only need one efi partition and one big btrfs partition, since you can create subvolumes on it. There it doesn’t matter how big all the partitions have to be. But, sure, you can create quotas for every subvolume. If it is UEFI, then you will need a efi partition additionally at about 100MB-500MB.

Btrfs has also swapfile support, but you need to deactivate compression and COW on that file.

This is for example a nice guide, how someone would do luks with btrfs on a VM:

The nice thing about btrfs is: you can expand the partition to another drive really easy as JBOD, RAID0 or RAID1. This function is builtin and don’t rely on mdadm for example. And not to forget: doing snapshot backups of the system really fast compared to rsync, because it works on filesystem/driver level and not with an external tool.

BUT to be honest, you will need knowledge about it and you have to tinker, since there is no auto installation for that (without luks sure). I would recommend to do it step for step yourself, then you know what you have done and if something is broken, you know at least where to start looking.

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This was a great tutorial up until this point.
@megavolt

Mount Partitions: Click on it and confirm the dialog. Make the following selection:

Select ROOT Partition: /dev/mapper/crypt_vda3, Filesystem btrfs, confirm the format, and choose and confirm the following mount options if you are on a SSD or NVME:
- ssd: use SSD specific options for optimal use on SSD and NVME
- noatime: prevent frequent disk writes by instructing the Linux kernel not to store the last access time of files and folders (noatime also includes nodiratime)
- space_cache: allows btrfs to store free space cache on the disk to make caching of a block group much quicker
- commit=120: time interval in which data is written to the filesystem (value of 120 is taken from Manjaro)
- compress=zstd: allows to specify the compression algorithm which we want to use. btrfs provides lzo, zstd and zlib compression algorithms. Based on some Phoronix test cases, zstd seems to be the better performing candidate. Otherwise stick with Manjaro’s default options.
- Confirm that you like to create subvolumes, choose the automatic mode, which creates subvolumes @ for /, @home for /home, and @cache for /var/cache.
- Select SWAP Partition: /dev/vda2 and confirm to mkswap.
- Select additional partitions: I don’t need any more partitions, as the EFI partition comes next, so click Done.
**Select UEFI partition: /dev/vda1 with mount point /boot/efi***

when I get to the end the option marked with ** I do not get this option!
This whole line “Select additional partitions: I don’t need any more partitions, as the EFI partition comes next, so click Done.” since I don’t get the UEFI partition option. I cant find it anywhere.

I swear it’s not on the ```
manjaro-architect-20.0.3-200607-linux56.iso
SHA1: 315dbdeaf8cf59ab47fee4dc499e3579cb54341f

any help would be great :)
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@av8r

Yeah, the thing is:

It works as long as it works. So better try to do it the arch way for now, like this:

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there is 2 types bootloader
a) /boot/efi ( no more than 32Mo ) , it will only contains script grub
or
b) /boot ; it will contains more ( img kernel , failback 500 to 800mo )

for root / between 30Go to 50Go ( depending on install package )
/home the rest
for someone with 16Go or more , no need of swap unless very high specific compile programs ,

not forget GPT format

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@megavolt turns out the architect installer works, but I had to set my MB to UEFI instead of UEFI and legacy. then the UEFI option showed up.

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@stephane thank you for your input. I got the architect installer to work and have now i have 512MiB for uefi and the rest to /root/home I guess. I have to open up a different topic now because if don’t think my fstab is correct. or i’m missing something in the documentation I have read and followed. with regards to subvolumes .

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