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One bit of advice I will give you because I haven't seen anyone else offer it: partition your drive and look up how to install your /home to a separate partition from root.
Give the /home partition most of the space because that's where everything goes. By doing this, you can completely wipe your system drive and reinstall even a different distribution and's basically lose nothing. Just in case everything really goes to hell and you can't repair it without a reinstall.
This was quite easy to do with Mint, but I did need to follow directions as you have to deviate from just following defaults for everything.
Oh yeah, suggesting Linux partitioning to a noob... lmao I use Linux for years with many distros and I still don't understand this part.
People partition windows systems all the time. It's not hard.
Yeah, but Windows partitions are pretty easy to understand since you don't have a bunch of different extra partitions and filesystems that also differ between distros. You typically just make a C partition, pray that its size will be enough for the next years, and then make a second one for all of your data. You don't have to think about root and boot partitions, which filesystem to chose, which name to give, how and if you should encrypt which partition, etc. etc. It's all much more streamlined and well documented. On Linux every distro kinda does its own thing, so you can't even just quickly look shit up. And if you want to encrypt things, suddenly all the guides are invalid anyway. It's just messy and obtuse.
During Mint setup, it was surprisingly easy. Spent more time researching file systems. One GUI tool. Configured a swap, EFI, /, and /home. Very easy. I don't know about other distros.
I did manage to get seperate partitions, allocating 20 gb for the root. Now I'm installing software and it keeps saying the root is full... Does it not automatically install in /home? I can't find a way to point installers to the home partition...
The Linux system and applications get installed to root. /home is for user applications, documents, etc. everything that would be account-based on windows.
Depending on the size of your drive I might allocate 50gb or more to root. I have 250gb allocated and 46.65 are used. Everything else can go to /home.
Mine looks like this.
Thanks, I just went with suggestions. Think I'll need to reinstall to make a better sized root, unfortunately, but that's for tomorrow
Hopefully the reinstall worked out better. When I said everything gets installed to home I didn't mean literally everything. System level stuff gets installed at root. Personal stuff gets installed on home. Like Steam gets installed on root, Steam games get installed on home.
So you do need enough storage on root for all the system level stuff you might want to do. But the vast majority of your space will be taken up by user-level stuff.
It's worth noting that you can resize partitions without starting over. You can reduce one partition to move the space to unallocated, then assign the unallocated space to the other partition.
Oh, that's good to know, I just reinstalled as one partition, seeing as it's my spare laptop and I figured there aren't going to be many personal files on there anyway.
Well anyway, I hope you enjoy Mint despite the rough start. The second partition has proven useful when I tried a different distribution a couple of times. I didn't lose my local notebooks or ssh keys that I use for development. I've repaired my system a couple of times after a hard lock, but if I couldn't I like knowing I could reinstall to repair it and not lose anything that's a pain in the butt to deal with.
Yeah it was worth getting a bit of experience with that. If I decide to migrate my main workhorse over it'll come in handy, as it has two drives, and I'll need to manage partitions on that.
I'll be trying out some distos over the next year and see what works for my setup. Running into things to solve seems part of the learning curve. So tough starts are kind of how you learn imho.