I just got a new laptop and installed Linux on it. I mainly run OpenSUSE.
Getting full encryption on both was a bit of a challenge and I had no idea what I’m doing. Will having the swap partition in the middle break things? Did I really need so many partitions (Mint and OpenSUSE don’t show up in eachother’s boot menu)?
I’m probably not gonna change this layout (because reinstallation seems like a pain) unless the swap partition’s position is a problem. I’m just curious how many mistakes I made.
I’m averse to installing things that don’t come with my distro. More software means more risk of a malicious update (which is the greatest security threat I face). Also seems a bit hacky so I’d be worried it’d cause instability. Plus I’m just not that technical.
Well, good news then: lvm comes with most modern linux distros. In fact, it is an option you can enable when installing linux mint.
I use it on every system that I run (workstations and servers) and never had any issues.
It really just makes partition management way easyer: With normal partitions you cannot grow any partition without moving all other partitions after it. LVM can do it without touching anything else.
The best case for semthing like this is when you buy bigger ssd. You can copy the data with dd and then grow any and partitions that you want without hassle.