I was going to do a really long writeup of this, but after some time (A couple days of mulling and revisions, in fact) and seeing I was going to just repeat the same crap, I might as wall cat what I was going to say to the basic point I was going to make. I’ve seen far too many people not embrace the use of partitions when keeping your stuff in a separate part of your system media, or on a separate media altogether saves a watershed of headache.
It’s not rocket science. Just understand which partitions you can do symbolic links with if you want to do things the way I prefer or learn about xdg-update-user-dirs
to redefine where stuff normally in the home folder goes and figure out workarounds for consequences when programs expecting directories to be in /home
don’t exist. That might be the only hard part about using a separate partition for your stuff.
Otherwise I’ve waxed enough about this. Some of my information is inaccurate, i.e. mentioning sub-optimal uses of the extended partition which allows for practically infinite partitions to be made above the three other physical parts you get to make, but most of it is spot-on and sound for dual-booters to utilize.
Here’s a bit from what I was previously staging for commit which should really bring home the purpose of partitions;
###Comprehension through metaphors
Partitioning, in its most basic form are virtual containers for your data. Much like how directories are containers for directories and files, partitions are the largest and most significant boxes inside the big box of data your disk represents. Consider this;
If your system media is the house of your data, then partitions are the rooms inside, with containers which hold folders that have other folders and papers inside.
Most people who use computers (from what I had seen) don’t quite understand this. Rather than a well-built house, people would rather keep their data in a studio apartment out of sheer laziness. You have a bedroom for yourself, why not a bedroom for your data? Disregarding partition-specific features, partitions are rooms for your data. Sometimes you may deal with partitions not related with your system media; transport mediums, garages, sheds and space you rent but ultimately it has to go into a partition, for data not in a room you have access to is data you cannot use.