On 2014-07-11 05:05, kitepilot wrote:

Michael Havens writes:

The data on my root partition only is about 8 gig.  The partition in total
is 48 gig. Can anyone say wasted space?

Can anybody ask: Why does Michael need a 'boot' partition to begin with?

If you're going to have more than 1 distro on a machine, having a boot partition is a good idea as it simplifies bootloader configuration.

(my opinion follows, we all know the global opinion about opinions)

Yes, these are my opinions and most of them can't really be objectively proven or tested.

Other partitions for specific directories (/tmp /var/log) are mostly
predicated on guarding the machine against inadvertent 'filesystem
fill up'

This is true.  Having / or /var fill up tends to cause problems even on a single-user workstation though.

Point is: why does Michael (or someone like 'Michael') need several
specific directories isolated on specific partitions?
Answer?  He doesn't...  YMMV.

Having one partition is the simplest thing to do, and means you don't have to worry about making /usr or /var large enough.[0]  I do this if there's only 1 disk and only 1 distro on the machine.

On my desktop, there's 1 SSD and 2 spinny-disks in softRAID-1.  SSD has 4 partitions:  EFI boot, /boot, / , and an empty partition where / will go in case I want to try something other than Gentoo.  Spinny-disks have 3 partitions:  backup / in case the SSD fails[1], swap, and an LVM partition.  LVM partition contains LVs for /var , /home , and /usr/portage , and there's still about 400G for those LVs to become larger or to create new LVs.  (LVM is more flexible than partitions, and allows you to get around the 15-partition limit, but only Linux can handle it.)

[0] Having /usr be separate from / is more difficult than it used to be, though.
[1] Hey, it could happen!

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