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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

It defaults to one / for it all, but if you tell it not to it will suggest partition sizes for you. Regardless this is definitely self-inflicted.

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Absolutely. I should have verified partition sizing, and I should never have allowed even one flatpak. That doesn't make Debian default sizes and installation process anywhere close to good.

Why, of all root directories, would you skimp out on /var? It literally stands for variable data.

Ask the Debian maintainers. That was their recommendation, and I trusted them - presuming they would recommend something that would work more than two weeks on a rather standard laptop installation. I will have to re-partition within the next year, because their / partition is too small as well.

But the default is to just use / no? So you did not trust them.

I think this happens because the default option is “recommended for new users”. So some not-new users believe that the other options are better for them.

That default options reads like this: “All files in one partition (recommended for new users)”

No, they make more than one recommendation - including which partitions to make and the sizes for each of them should you opt into their separate partition path in the installer. So they have defaults for multiple partitions and partition sizes - and I trusted them to have thought them through.

Two improvements that could be made: 1) Easy: put a brief Note in the installer indicating what might fill up the partitions quickly so people can have a heads-up, do a little research, and make a better decision. 2) moderate: still keep the Note, but also check the disk size and maybe ask which type of workload (server, development, home user), then propose something a bit more tailored.

Why not just use the default, instead of separate partitions for everything? This is not a 30-year-old BSD.

For better control over permissions:

```

/ / ext4 defaults 1 1

/home /home ext4 defaults,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

/tmp /tmp ext4 defaults,bind,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

/var /var ext4 defaults,bind,nosuid 1 2

/boot /boot ext4 defaults,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

```

Because it isn't used for much? It's mostly just logs these days. Most data on most systems goes in /usr or /home. I would say the weird thing here is that Flatpak puts runtimes in /var by default instead of ~/.cache or something like that.

Where do you think docker containers are installed?

User-mode Flatpaks keep things in ~/.local/share/flatpak. This person simply installed a Flatpak in system-mode, which puts it somewhere other users could also run it (i.e. not your home directory).

Libvirt virtual machines are also stored there.

>I should never have allowed even one flatpak

I don't think that's the best conclusion: these days, disk is cheaper than it has ever been, and that "foundational" 8 GB will serve all the Flatpaks you want. Installing apps from packages sprays the same dependency shit all over your system; Flatpak was nice enough to contain it, so you immediately noticed it.

Flatpak is a good idea.

It's at best a mixed bag which makes it harder to fine-tune apps on your system and with limited security benefits (which again become harder to improve yourself).

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html#flatpak

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