Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.

[Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net>]

On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 00:34 +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Ma, 11 feb 14, 23:20:11, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > IOW there is no reason why somebody shouldn't install
> > nearly all available packages.
> 
> Of course there is. Besides the waste of space there are many packages 
> that run daemons which one might not need.

That's not completely true. Users perhaps want to compare a lot of
software, before they decide what DEs and apps they prefer to use. This
isn't a waste of space. Running unneeded daemons could cause issues,
e.g. if you care for real-time, but even if many unneeded daemons are
installed as hard dependencies, there's no need to start all those
daemons.

There also often isn't the need to e.g. have all USB ports available, it
could make sense to unbind some of them, but less Linux users ever
unbind nasty USB ports.

There is no rule that / including /usr won't be much large than 8.19
GiB. For many installs it's indeed plenty space, but for other installs
it could be not enough space.