Elementary OS pre-install question from perennial Linux newbie: partition scheme

Question

I've been toying with Unix & Linux since Mandrake, but always gave up. Now committed to using something other than Windows as a daily driver.

Like what I see with EOS Live these past few days and want to install on 16Gb/256Gb X1 Carbon. Planning on single boot with whole drive encrypted, however, I have to have a Win10 VM, and would like to install other VMs (Kali, Whonix and other distros) along with containers for experimentation and learning. Based upon my hardware config and use case, what would be ideal partitioning? TIA

Ian C>

Answer 1

Depends on what you're planning to do with your Windows virtual machine, because Windows normally can't see Linux (ext4-formatted) drives and work with them. So if you don't plan to heavily exchange files between elementary OS (or any other Linux-based virtual machine) and Windows VM, and keep all Windows user files inside Windows virtual disk, you can go with two partitions:

• Partition 1 (for swap): 16 GB
• Partition 2 (for elementary OS and user files, ext4-formatted): all the remaining space, i.e. 240 GB.

In case you're planning to exchange files between any Linux OS and Windows VM, you can go with three partitions:

• Partition 1 (for swap): 16 GB
• Partition 2 (for elementary OS and user files, ext4-formatted): 120 GB
• Partition 3 (for file exchange with Windows, NTFS-formatted): 120 GB

(Obviously, the more files you need to exchange with Windows, the bigger partition 3 should be.)