New notebook and factory partition
First time using a linux, I’m using Debian 12. My notebook arrived with the following partition (512gb SSD), in this order (left to right in the disk viewer):
/boot/efi – 537mb
/root – 20gb
recover (unmounted) – 10gb
Swap – 16gb
/home – 466gb
Since I’ve started using it, I noticed that everything gets installed in root, so I’m now constantly out of space, even had to search how to clean etc.
My question is: should I rearrange the partitions, allocating more to /root, or start using /home as my ‘main’ folder? I’ve seen tutorials on gparted, to accomplish the first option, but I haven’t tried it yet. The second option is something that I didn’t find much about. That’s why I’m asking here first, so I don’t do anything that will make more harm than good for my linux experience, which has been positive so far.
Thanks in advance!
welcome to the GNU/Linux world! I found a little bit strange that the partition of / so small is. Small comment, /root and / are two different locations in Linux, but as you don’t mentioned /, I assumed that you are referring to /, where all packages are actually installed.
Debian and their derivations (Ubuntu e.g) will always by default install every package in /, depending on the package it could be in different folders, but always in the partition of /. Debian uses .deb (imagine something like .exe) to install packages and you cannot change the location of it, because the .deb package says where it should be located.
This can be changed, but as answer in this question Installing packages into local directory?, it is not an easy task for beginners or even intermediate users, because the package are made to find their dependencies in certain folders.
Therefore, I would suggest to increase the size of your main partition, having a 200GB of /home should be enough. If you find problems in this case, I would highly recommend to install the SO from zero, there are plenty tutorials on internet.
Welcome again to the community, have fun!