An Introduction to Linux part 2

Getting more specific

While I can’t possibly go through all the different installation details here, I’ll try to give a few tips about the most frustrating part of the installation: disk partitioning and formatting. Installing distros like Ubuntu is quite straight forward, one just needs to answer a few questions and accept the defaults if in doubt, but disk partitioning is better not left in the default settings. Instead of describing the entire procedure in detail, I will give a few guidelines, and if you are not sure about something, at least you'll know what to search for. I will focus here on the differences between the default disk setup scheme that Ubuntu suggests, and what I would recommend from my experience. First of all, it’s good practice to create a separate /home partition. The /home partition is where your personal files reside, and it’s better to keep them separate from the system files, so you can easily reinstall the system without touching your data (there are other reasons to keep them separated as well). Another point is that if your PC has over 8 GB of RAM, it’s unnecessary to create a swap partition (a portion of the disk which can be used as an extension to the system memory). Also, keep in mind that on traditional hard drives (not SSDs), the partitions which are closer to the beginning of the disk are faster. The defaults during Ubuntu’s installation sometimes go against these points, as they do not suggest a separate /home partition, always create swap space, and put it at the slower end of your hard drive, while if you do need swap, you would want to have it in the fastest part of your drive. If you have an SSD, on the other hand, the physical location of the data on disk does not matter, but your computer probably has also enough RAM not to need a swap space.

I suggest drawing your desired partitioning scheme on paper in scale to help visualize it. Only after you’re sure about what you want, and searched for all the different options (always reading more than the first answer, like I said above) it would be a good time to begin the installation. If your computer boots using UEFI, you will need a separate UEFI partition, usually to be placed as the first one on the hard drive. These details are the “Google material” you need to search for before you begin.

Partitioning is just dividing your hard drive into logical segments, but you also need a file system to store your data. Each partition can be formatted with a different file system according to your needs. Regarding the file systems, out of the many possibilities available I will focus on 3: ext4, XFS, and BTRFS. Ext4 is the default option in most Linux distributions. It is fast, reliable,
and feature-rich. If in doubt: use it! XFS is old and robust, and is optimized for storing large files. If you have a lot of movie files on your /home (or separate “movies”) partition, you should use XFS there for better performance. BTRFS is a new “next-gen” filesystem for Linux with lots of advanced features such as snapshotting (taking multiple snapshots of the filesystem, automatically or manually, and if necessary reverting to one of these snapshots). BTRFS also enables transparent compression, meaning that all the files are automatically compressed before being written to disk, which saves space and increases performance in certain cases. Another advanced feature of BTRFS is data integrity checks, and if more than one hard drive is connected, also recovery of corrupted files. BTRFS has many other very interesting and advanced features, but it is still quite new and not as extensively tested as ext4 or XFS. So in conclusion, just use ext4 as the filesystem, unless you have a lot of big files, in which case you should consider XFS. If you want to experiment with advanced filesystem features (with a very small risk of losing your data), you can use BTRFS.

To conclude

How do you learn, how do you get “fluent”? One answer: by using and asking! You should just use the tools, and when problems arise there are a lot of resources available online. There’s a great and helpful community. While just googling for answers is helpful, you can also reach out for help (and fun times!) to the local Linux and open source clubs and associations. Chances are there’s one in your area! If you’re located near Zürich, Switzerland (hey, there’s one in US as well!) you can check out the activities of TheAlternative. They offer help with all open source related issues, organize social events, and organize the LinuxDays, a series of lectures and hands-on events, which can give you solid fundamentals in Linux and the free and open source software world.

Being part of the open source community can be very satisfactory on the personal level. I, for example, feel that I am a part of a really fair economy: customers pay a company to develop a software product which they need, the company develops it, and releases under an open source license to the community. Everybody wins! The customers got the specific feature which they wanted, the company got payed, the community got a new feature that they can now use and participate in its development for their own needs, while helping the original customer “for free”. This creates a circle of mutual help and material profit. This ecosystem is amazing and it thrives without any marketing at all, contrary to the huge marketing efforts by companies that develop proprietary software, like Microsoft and Apple.

Linux is just the most famous and probably the most successful representative of the free (as in freedom) and open source software world. There are countless other free software projects which you can use right now without the need to reinstall your operating system. You can use Firefox to browse the internet, GIMP to edit photos, VLC to play videos, LibreOffice to create documents, or Blender to create 3D worlds. You can do it on Windows or Mac as well, and if you decide to switch to Linux, you will already be familiar with these program.