As the original poster said, the default partition done by choosing guided install with separate "/home" only reserves about only 10- GB for the "/" partion. This is way too small since, in this set up, "/" will hold/var, /usr, and /lib, and all of them are known to bloat (when you need to run apt-get upgrade, etc.)
> pretty sure 10 GB is quite reasonable for a root filesystem, unless you
have specific requirements (which you didn't mention, so that's hard to figure out). Last I checked, default is *not* using separate directories so if you're switching away from it, I'm sure you could also partition as you desire…
No, I think you are missing the point.[It is true 10 GB root "/" is enough if "/usr", "/lib", "/var" and possibly others are on separate partition. But the auto-guided partition when we instruct a separate "/home" directory does not separate all these bloated directories AND only reserve 10 GB "/". This is crazy. I suspect with the easy-intall, ONLY using the entire partition (with the exception of swap) is really USABLE. Pity since the easy install should give the simple and less time consuming step to do a REASONABLE install.
The current install when we pick "separate /home" fails this criteria. My point is, if we say, separate "/home", do it as instructed, butreserve at least 30-50 GB (depending on the size of the disk/ssd/etc.) for the root partition so that at least, during the initial cycles of "get-apt update upgrade install", we won't run out of "/" partition. Some admins are in a hurry and they expect a reasonable minimum for root partition.
This problem of running out of "/" partions have happened a few times in the last few years (especially since TeX packages have become very large and the default desktop requires TeX packages as part of dependency.)
[Another issue, of course, is the non-intuitive manner to reach the desired FULL manual partition from the installer. I think the installer has DEGRADED in this regard over the years. I could not find the full manual partition easily this time. But I will file a different bug entry for the non-intuitive UI.]
I am attaching a partition list as a screen dump on a test install when the problem was noticed. Since the system I had was unusable when during the upgrade (apt-get upgrade) it ran out of "/" and nothing could be done further. I could not even run debianbug command, etc. since it failed to execute properly. I had to erase the crippled installation and start over. I captured the listing of "flist -l" before erasing the installation.
TIAPS: if this particular bug entry is not the proper bug entry to complain about this grave usability issue (from the perspective busy sysadmins, let me know if I should file a new bug entry.
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