[julioneander]

If one filesystem gets full, you still can do some work on the others. You can also more easily umount a filesystem to fsck without the need of booting a live media. You can mount filesystems with different flags, like readonly on /boot to prevent accidents.

Modern smartphones do this, on Android for example you are able to find a filesystem for system binaries generally mounted readonly, a filesystem for the base OS and system apps, another filesystem for user installed apps. If a rogue app fills the entire filesystem it's resided, the system apps can still function.

[jandrese]

Also, if you corrupt one filesystem you don't necessary trash all of your work. Especially if you corrupt the root filesytem all you need is to reinstall the OS and all of your data is still intact without having to mess with your backups.

For the most part however people have decided that slicing up your disk into multiple partitions isn't worth the hassle anymore, and almost all distros just dump everything on a giant /.

[rhizome]

To be fair, the partitioning UX in both the FreeBSD and Debian (possibly linux in general) is scary.

[0815test]

It used to be scary on debian, but there's now a non-scary one starting from the etch release (Debian 4.0). The new UI is quite clear and comfortable to use, even in the "expert" mode.

[ianai]

What’s to be afraid of at install time? If you make something too big/small just do it again.