this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Is there a reason to install one(1) singular OS across multiple partitions? Is it just because that's how our ancestors did things?
Partitions are crude buckets that tell Operating Systems that "this lump is a filesystem that you know how to read" or "you don't know how to read this, leave it alone". Partitions tell UEFI that it should only use this special FAT32 chunk. A partition is not a good mechanism to set quotas, as you can see from how difficult it is to expand. A bunch of partitions that are all mounted together does little to isolate against failures.
If you want to run an OS across two filesystems that provide different characteristics (one provides atomic snapshots, the other provides ??), that would have to live on different partitions. Would you be better served by putting it all on the more modern FS? Is the older filesystem only kept around because it straddles "what my OS knows" and "what my bootloader knows"? If it's just for the bootloader's sake, that's why we have /boot.