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Comment by sgc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

```

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