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.
EDIT: I’m not upgrading my drive capacity. I do not need it.
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Never more in my life have I wanted to send a stranger a larger hard drive.
The laptop it’s replacing also bad just 256gb of storage.
I think the partitioning itself is fine, but I wouldn’t have 3 operating systems on a 256 GB NVMe, because I’d be running out of space a lot.
if you won’t ever use Windows, you can nuke it. Then I’d consider making one of the Linux ones a VM - if you’re trying out that distro. That will cut down 12 partitions to 5.
Lastly, you can look into btrfs to make better use of space between (the current) p11 and p12: you can make them subvolumes that won’t eat up each other’s storage when not in use.
I’m only have about 20GB of files so I think I’ll be fine on space.
I’m keeping Windows 11 around in case I need it for … IDK taxes (though I don’t have secureboot enabled because [points to image above]). A VM won’t work for the Mint one, I need it separate for reasons I won’t go into.
Btrfs was installed in default but I only know how to do full-disk encryption on ext4. Apparently btrfs doesn’t have built-in support for it. I really liked how it was neatly organized into subvolumes but alas.
Tax software is basically all in browser at this point.
I’m an accounting graduate, so yes. Most things should be in a browser really, since generally a webpage can’t give you malware.
I would create another couple of efi partitions, just to confuse attackers more
Why keep the windows partition if you don’t use it?
In case I need it in some scenario which I can’t even conceive of.
The pain of keeping it around will outweigh the pain of needing it and not having it.
Quick boot into windows to help a friend test something on your machine?
- Twenty-five bajillion updates since you never logged in
- Windows “helpfully” cleaning up your Linux bootloader
- Any shared NTFS partition between windows and Linux is almost guaranteed to be left in a “dirty” state when windows shuts down, meaning you have to run ntfsfix before Linux will mount it again
And suddenly, that’s where you’ll be spending the whole afternoon. I agree with the others who say a VM is probably good enough.
I absolutely do not trust Windows 11 to be a good dual-boot citizen so I’m going to remove it. Gonna replace OpenSUSE with Kubuntu so I’ll do it then.
Virtual Machine.
My laptop came with Windows 11, I nuked it and installed Linux before even booting lol.
Could I preserve the activation key the refurbisher provided doing that (I’m gonna google whether I can anyway)?
I really don’t know, sorry.
that’s a good question and I’m not sure. Worth it to find out, but personally I don’t dual boot with Windows. I just have my main linux install and use a virtual machine. I never have needed to use a windows virtual machine but it would be interesting if I could activate it with the copy that came with my laptop.
Unless that copy is registered to my microsoft account? I have no idea that’s how much I try to avoid windows now
Are you able to install a second SSD in your laptop? If you really need to keep it around, it’s best practice to have Windows on its own physical drive.
Or if it’s feasible, make your old laptop your dedicated Windows machine.
My old laptop doesn’t have a TPM or Secureboot (or a working CTRL key). So that idea’s out.
I’ll try and put it on a VM, not sure whether that’ll preserve my key though.
Troubleshooting for friends or getting paid for playing a kernel level game in my case.
Well, I’m not doing that.
Why don’t you delete windows
I am afraid that in the future something I need will require Windows 11. Whether that be interacting with the government or maybe if I go back to university.
Can’t speak to your exact machine but nowadays the license tends to be tied to the hardware.
If you are capable of manual partitioning then you should be able to reinstall Windows quickly if needed.
I guess I could reinstall Windows, I really hate the idea of running the Windows 11 installer though.
Tbh I will usually simply swap out the OEM drive for a bigger and faster (and typically cheaper than the OEM upgrade option, per size) one the second I unbox it (optionally, go through the setup process before taking it out, so it’s ready to go next time you want to plug it in). This lets you not waste space on that “rainy day” contingency (which I’ve almost never actually needed). The one exception (and I keep a dedicated laptop around for this) is automotive diagnostic suites with proprietary USB hardware - I’ve got an old thinkpad still running windows 7. XP would honestly be better, because a lot of that shit doesn’t like “new” versions of windows.
I do not need more space. I need 25GB per Linux system and 64GB for Windows (which I’m going to backup anyway), plus 20GB of data.
I may keep Windows 10 on my Desktop too. It’s nowhere near as scary as Windows 11.
Ok, sure, you do you. Simply offering a way to do this that works well for me.
Problem for me is, I don’t know how to install windows. Especially onto a partition of 70gb instead of whole disk
It should be possible to grab the license key before you wipe it. You could also copy it into an external drive and store it away as is
I’m not sure the refurbisher I got my laptop from even gave Windows a license key. It kept bugging me to create an account to fully activate it or something, I should boot into it to check but the thought of opening up Windows 11 just gives me the creeps.
EDIT: They did give me a license. It was just Windows being Windows.
VM might be enough
Depends whether they’ll start using TPM in combination with kernel-level anti-cheat to ensure you don’t use AI in an exam or something. I don’t know what the future holds and barely understand what a TPM does.
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At some point if they have ridiculous restrictions one might consider … doing the test in person, in a room provided by the actual school or that THEY provide the hardware.
Anyway IMHO the bigger point is that a lot of my own inaction (I won’t speak for others) came from fear of problems that rarely, if ever, materialized. I would recommend to move on and if the problem does actually arise then consider solutions at that point.
I uninstalled Windows on my SSD years ago (despite paying for it, forced by OEM deals), didn’t regret it once. In fact, I wear it as a “badge of honor” with pride. When someone tells me I “have” to use Windows for whatever reason, I tell them I can’t and that usually leads to interesting conversations.
Yeah I’ll probably try to work out how to back it up. Don’t want to have to give Microsoft money though so I’ll clone it and store it on a USB.
I imagine legally speaking, if you care for that, the license key is enough but depends on your jurisdiction, if you care for this kind of things. That said as the pace OS deprecates doubt it’d be useful.
Lost my license key anyway. Goodbye forever Windows 11.
Can emulate TPM
also kernel level anti cheat is for video games
Virt-manager can run windows in a vm
Looks like it’s included in Ubuntu too, so I think I’ll use that (I’m changing to Kubuntu after yet again needing to find missing packages).
On a more serious note, as others have said, you’ll probably burn through these weird storage limitations quickly.
Also, what do you mean by “sensitive matters” on Mint? Because almost any way you spin it, I feel like it’s not a great idea:
- If you’re talking professional, confidential work with clients, keeping it on the same device where you do anything personal sounds like a terrible idea, and it’s probably worth it to shell out for a dedicated device just for this.
- If it’s more personal things like government documents, medical records, and other things I’ll neglect to name here, running a separate operating system just for those just feels like unnecessary paranoia and will cause you unnecessary trouble. If you’re careful, it shouldn’t be a problem - the major browsers prevent file access through protections against cross-site scripting.
Also, as I said in another comment here, please upgrade that drive before you put a lot of data on it. If you don’t and you run out of storage later (a near-certainty on 256GB), you’ll have to go through the effort of getting everything copied, which may include equipment purchases and several hours of your time when you could jut do it right now while your important files are still small enough to fit on a flash drive right now. Save yourself the future trouble.
Anyhow, I wish you happy Linux usage.
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.
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.
Some of the responses I got were about how the swap partition is useless, and someone else replied to them that they were wrong. I haven’t responded to these people because I don’t yet understand who’s right. I’ll use a swap file or just no swap altogether once I check for myself if the anti-swap people are nutters. I assume temporary files aren’t saved to swap but instead to temp so I can’t imagine what it’s used for on an SSD.
I found yet another thing I’d need to manually install with OpenSUSE Leap (and at that point I may aswell use Arch with all it’s documentation glory). I didn’t have any of these issues with Ubuntu-based distros so I’m doing a fresh install with Kubuntu.
I’m gonna LVM it with two distros and a shared data partition.
If it works, it works. Unless you’re working in Espionage, anything is honestly fine as long as your main storage is encrypted. The boot loader exploits still can’t unencrypt things, just allow access to the data, which…still can’t be decrypted as as we know.
It’s fine.
I should probably work out how to set up secureboot someday.
