this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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is there any drawback to having too many partitions? (linux.community)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by vestmoria@linux.community to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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experimenting with my 2014 macbook pro and several linux distros (xubuntu, mint, fedora)

So far I have 8 partitions:

  • 1 EFI for grub,
  • 1 hfs+ (Linux HFS+ ESP) for OCLP, I think,
  • 1 apfs for the macOS 14 I cannot boot,
  • 2 ext4 for xubuntu and mint
  • 1 brfs for fedora (so it cannot be ext4?)
  • 2 unallocated ones, because I deleted systems I don't want.

I use gparted: the 2 unallocated sections are separated. Is this a problem?

How many partitions are too many for this machine? 247 GiB storage and 7.66 GiB memory.

After I'm done experimenting and keep the 2 to 3 operative systems I like, should I wipe the notebook, create the 2 to 3 partitions I'm going to need and reinstall? Or would it be better to simply delete the partitions I don't want?

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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Not really - sounds like you do need actual partitions since you're running different OSs. Typically you would use some other form of volume management (LVM, btrfs, zfs) for partitioning within a single OS. But for separate installs it's fine. gparted does a good job of letting you move things around and resize as needed. Just take care when shrinking partitions to shrink the filesystem first.

There used to be a time where there were obnoxious limits about the number and types of partitions you could have on disk (2 "physical partitions" and some number of "logical partitions" - I forget the details now). But if it works it works.