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.
Is there any reason? You’re effectively wasting half the drive by using that space for OSes you almost never use.
If you ever happen to need Windows, which I don’t see happening as you yourself can’t imagine an actual use case, you can just go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer or maybe use your phone.
As for Mint, do you just have it to experiment with? If you’re just trying to try out other distros, a virtual machine or even live USBs are much easier ways to quickly try out new systems without having to clear actual partitions.
If you had much more storage then sure, waste some of it, but you’re really gonna be missing that 120gb if you use your computer for… basically anything.
The order of the partitions basically doesn’t matter at this point – I think having a boot partition first used to be important for MBR schemes but I’m pretty sure in the UEFI era you can have them in whatever order. As others have mentioned, you could combine your EFI partitions, but doing so to an already installed system is slightly complex. You also could shrink some of your EFI and boot partitions, I’m not sure of the recommended sizes off the top of my head but I think they could be smaller. On the other hand, your swap partition should probably be bigger – making it the same size as your RAM is a good rule of thumb and will enable hibernation (I think).
Yep, gonna clone and delete Windows 11.
Library might work.
I’m using Mint for sensitive matters, I want to keep it separate from my daily driver.
I’ll basically just be using this laptop for web-browsing.
I don’t really use hibernation. I’ll need to enable swap encryption though.
Why would you clone it first? Just nuke it if you don’t plan on using it. It has no value. You can always install it from scratch.
If you don’t plan to expand the swap partition, I would recommend just deleting the swap partition – you could either make it a new ext4 and use LVM to combine it with the shared storage, or if you’re going to combine your EFI partitions you could grow your Mint partition to include both the SUSE EFI and the swap partition – and using a swap file instead, as another commenter mentioned. You honestly really don’t need swap space regardless with 16gb of RAM if you’re really just using this to run a web browser, but you can easily set up a swap file if you want one.