[brudgers]

I've been goofing around with Linux over the last seven years or so starting with VM's and going to dual boot about three and a half years ago and going with Linux as my primary OS about three years ago. This is where I am at with my partitioning:

  0. Must have: /home and a swap.
  1. Proven to be useful: /boot, /
  2. On the fence: /usr
  3. Not worth it for me: /tmp, /opt

Without /home, upgrading and running multiple distros on the same machine are more pain and riskier. Having a separate swap makes having separate distros easier.

Using /boot seems to play better with UEFI Bios options or rather it reduces the entanglement of a UEFI Bios options with the rest of the system. Having a / partition then sort of falls into the crack between /home and /boot.

I'm currently using a /usr and until I upgrade or swithc, I won't really know its utility. It hasn't really proven to be a headache. /tmp was a headache because getting the size right (not to much, not to little) was just a system admin chore for no gain...but again, that's for me running Linux on a workstation.

Regarding wear and tear on an SSD, hoping the drive won't fail is not really a backup/reliability strategy. With adequate RAM a swap partition may not see much use, anyway. If it does, the price of a replacement SSD in a few years will probably be low compared to current cost. My experience with hard disks and SSD's is that I tend to wind up with more of them than I use over the years. YMMV.

Good luck.

[lagbaja]

Brudgers, I thank you. Cheers