I would create another couple of efi partitions, just to confuse attackers more
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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.
- You don't need multiple EFI system partitions! That's why Mint and OpenSUSE don't show up in each other's boot menu (or at least that's the first step, depending on your bootloader). The intention with the ESP is you put all EFI executables for dual-booting (and triple- and beyond) in there.
- Swap partition is fine anywhere. But as an aside, you can also just use a swapfile. Makes it easy to change the size dynamically. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file
- /dev/nvme0n1p6 I'd wonder why that's needed. /boot on /dev/nvme0n1p10 too, that's not strictly necessary.
None are game-breaking! You can just note these down for next time you have the itch to tinker.
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't have time this week to look into what a swapfile was and I delayed my response until I did. I will definitely be using a swap file since I do not ever use hibernation and encrypting my swap partition seems like a hassle.
I'm currently reinstalling things (after accidentally bricking the Windows partition and finding myself dissatisfied with openSUSE). Hopefully with just 4 partitions total (EFI, Kubuntu encrypted, Mint Xfce encrypted, data). I am removing the /boot from each because unless I'm leaving /boot unencrypted there's no reason to separate it out. Unfortunately encrypting /boot means GRUB doesn't detect it automatically in the Kubuntu installer so I'm still working out how to correct that.
You do want windows EFI separate as it occasionally likes to turf the Linux efi entries. With opensuse it will probe foreign OS and add chainloader entries to point to the other EFI bootloaders. You set the OpenSUSE to load first and choose mint or windows from the grub menu
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)?
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
I really don’t know, sorry.
nuke it 😎
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.
Yep, gonna clone and delete Windows 11.
Why would you clone it first? Just nuke it if you don't plan on using it. It has no value. You can always install it from scratch.
Doesn't matter anyway. It wouldn't fit on my USB so I shrunk the partition and now my copy of Windows 11 is bricked.
I really don't think 60 GB will be enough for daily use unless you have your home folder on a separate drive, which it doesn't seem is the case from your screenshot.
I have mine on a separate drive and my system partition (150 GB) is half-full. Is there a reason for your 25 GB per Linux installation rule?
Is the swap space unencrypted? If so it could potentially weaken overall system encryption
Nope. I'm just now realizing that I need to do that.