Manual partition on two separate drives

Installing Zorin OS
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Hi. New Zorin OS user (first Linux distro). I'm interested in reinstalling Zorin OS 18 and manually partitioning my two drives to make dist hopping easier (I want to try Mint Xfce next). I'm using an Acer Aspire E5-575 Series (8G RAM).

Currently researching what others have done with their manual partitions. My plan is this:

sda (HDD 931,000Mb)
sda1 /home

sdb (SSD 256,000Mb)
sdb1 /boot/efi 512Mb
sdb2 / 80,000Mb

Will this configuration allow me to swap between Zorin and Mint without touching my hard drive with the /home partition? What problems should I expect setting the OS up this way?

Also, should I format my drives with GParted in order to get all the storage out of them? sda is supposed to be a TB, and I'm pretty sure the sdb is supposed to be 3 or 4gigs (I bought and installed it a really long time ago, so I've forgotten exactly how big it actually is).

My secondary aim with partitioning like this is to make the laptop run a little faster. I'm interested in using it mostly for web browsing, writing with LibreOffice, and maybe light gaming. I guess it's fast enough as it is now:

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but I know launching games might make it chug a lot, and in Windows 10 I was able to speed this thing up just booting from the SSD.

Lastly, I've seen a lot of conflicting information about swap partitions. From what I understand, Zorin OS uses a swap file when the RAM is overloaded, so a swap partition is unnecessary. However, I've also read a swap partition can slow a machine down if the RAM is over a certain threshold anyway. If I make a swap partition, should I make it 8gigs or 4? Do I even need one for casual use? Will the laptop run faster with a swap partition when gaming with Steam? I'm not running photoshop or anything, but I do stream video a lot (YouTube, screenshare on Discord).

Lastly, if I want a secondary file system on the SSD, how should I mount it so that I can see it in the Files window? I did the standard install onto the hard drive and experimented with mounting the SSD, but I'd like to see it outside 'Other Locations'.

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You certainly know a lot more than the average "new to Linux" user :smiley:

Nevertheless, I will still give the same advice that I normally give people that are just getting started with Linux, which is to starting slow. There's always a learning curve when using something new; different processes, capabilities, applications, etc.
I experienced this when I first used MacOS, and later again when I first tried Linux, and later again when I tried Windows 11 after years of using Linux every day.

That said, however, I do encourage you to try since that is indeed the best way to learn. Just make sure you make enough backups along the way!

Are you looking to replace Windows entirely? I'm not a big fan of dual-boot systems, although with Windows out of the picture this is a lot safer to do. It's not that you can't, it's just my personal preference as I've been burned a few too many times by this.
Have you considered just using a single boot base system and running others as virtual machines? This is the safest approach that I recommend.

It looks like you want to use your SSD for the main operating system(s) installation, while using the HDD for your personal files. That's a good idea, perhaps slightly more advanced than what I'd recommend new users but very much doable. And this will allow you to preserve your files in the HDD even after re-installing a new OS, or even if you have multiple ones installed that you can boot into.
Note, however, that you will have to configure each system to mount this HDD as the /home partition. This can be done either during the installation or at a later point, so it should be easy enough.

You can do this during the installation of Zorin OS, and other distributions as well.

The main bottleneck in terms of performance is the disk. Make sure anything that needs to run fast is installed in the SSD.
This will lead us to another conversation regarding the different ways of installing software in Linux, namely Flatpaks... but that's another story for another day.

Swapping is not intended to make computers run any faster. It's a "safety net" that will prevent the system from running out of memory during spikes of high activity. If you find that your system is constantly swapping, then you are using it beyond it's hardware capabilities. Do this long enough and you will damage your drive by creating an excessive amount of reads/writes. The only solution to this is increase the amount of physical memory.

And is not like swapping makes your computer slow, it's just that writing out to disk, even modern SSDs, is orders of magnitude slower than writing to main memory. Therefore, it will always be slower, and this effect becomes more obvious the more memory your system is swapping.

There's something called ZRAM that will allow you to compress memory, which effectively achieves the same effect as swapping, but it all happens within RAM. It has a penalty of extra CPU power, but it's a good option for intensive applications like gaming.

However, I'd suggest looking into this later. For now, I'd avoid creating an additional partition for swapping and use the default swapfile handle this.

Not sure I understand this one. You want to have an additional partition in your SSD?

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What do you mean by swap between Zorin and Mint? Does it mean you going to dual boot these 2 Linux? That is the easiest way to have both distros available.

So, a few comments:
If dual boot, you have to plan the partitioning first. You need to use the manual partitioning option of each installers to get the root partitions of each where you planned. If you make a swap partition, it will be shared by the two distros. If you want separate home partitions, each distro needs one. On startup, the last OS installed boots to its grub menu, and from there you select which OS to use. That's basically it.

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Thanks for this, I didn't consider it. I'll try reinstalling and test by downloading Firefox to / and see if that improves things.

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Hello from my new install. /boot & / are on the SSD and /home is on the HDD. It's noticeably faster. Yay!

This honestly sounds like scifi to me. Only heard about virtual machines in the last week or two. I need to look into it more. Speaking of, thank you for going into detail about swaps. The way people write about them online is super vague, so this was great to read.

I did as you suggested and opted for no swap partition.

So, if I were to dual boot on this machine from where I am, I would need to add /boot, /, and /home partitions for the other OS? Honestly, dual booting isn't something I'd be interested in beyond an experimental phase. I'd rather just boot from a usb and replace Zorin on the SSD if I ended up liking that one more.

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Looking at your screenshot of sda you only have '/boot/efi' and '/', which means your hone is within '/' as a result of auto-install. Your sdb drive has no flags and is 256 Gb.

Personally, the smaller drive should hold your boot and root partitions, with your sda holding /home. You have 8 Gb of RAM which should be enough to avoid a swap partition if using an SSD. If a spindle drive I would allocate the same amount of space as your physical RAM. I would definitely use the 'Something else' method, which launches GParted. I always create a separate '/home' partition using the largest space available, with '/' set to 80 Gb. If your system goes south you use GParted again on fresh install, format '/' afresh and flag it as '/' and mark '/home' but don't format and your data is still there. As computers seem to have a mind of their own always good to backup data to an external device before a fresh install.

Using a VM, I recommend virt-manager over anything else, better than VB and Boxes from personal experience as you have greater control over every element of the VM. Bear in mind the maximum amount of RAM you can allocate cannot exceed more than half of your physical RAM. You also need to check if your Notebook (I refuse to use the term 'laptop' as it engenders bad practice and overheating!) BIOS supports CPU virtualization. Also be aware you cannot use VM's for gaming. I have found the quality of graphics using virt-manager to be the same as a bare metal install.

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If you want to get a realistic impression of how well/smoothly Linux Mint XFCE runs on your computer, I would not use a virtual machine for this, because for a virtual machine you have to split the available 8 GB RAM between the guest and host operating systems, so that you only have about 4 GB available for each. It will run, but very slowly. It is better to use a dual boot or install Mint XFCE as a single boot. If you just want to take a look at Linux Mint, you can also test it with a live USB boot stick or use the webpage distrosea.

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A virtual machine will be more than enough to test drive any distribution. It's true that there are certain performance and hardware limitations, but for something like Linux Mint XFCE, you don't really need all that much. And there are many other benefits:

  1. Virtually (pun intended) no risk to the host operating system.
  2. Create as many virtual machines as you want to test different distributions, software, configurations, etc.
  3. Run multiple virtual machines at the same time. Useful for testing or comparing features.
  4. Run VMs at the same time as your host operating system. With dual boot, you have to choose one or the other.
  5. Export your VMs as a file and import it in another computer, or keep as backup.

By the way, virtual machines aren't exclusive to Linux, so you can get started while still running Windows and install Zorin OS there, or any distribution you like.
If you break something, just delete the VM and create a new one, start over again. This will give you the confidence to try things out without fear of damaging your system.

Keeping things simple while you're learning is probably the single most important thing that you can do. You can always complicate things later if you really want to.

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For comparison, here are some disadvantages (I am referring to 8GB of available RAM overall):

The installation takes significantly longer than a bare metal installation.
It requires additional training in the creation of a virtual machine.
The creation of a virtual machine wears out the drive just as much as a bare metal installation (these are real write operations).
The virtual machine runs slowly. All updates, downloads, app installations take much longer.
You don't get a realistic impression of how fast the OS runs, how often the fans turn on, how long it takes to boot/open apps/webpages...
I'm not sure about the drivers, but I have no guest additions installed (they didn't work), so I think, the drivers of the host system are used and not the ones of the VM.

Virtual machines are great for exploring an operating system, researching its structure, trying things out, making experiments etc. without having to worry something brakes the computer.

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You don't need a separate boot partition in most installations.
/boot is just a folder in the root partition. In some installation cases it is needed, though. You don't need separate home partitions either. These facts reduce the number of partitions needed. So one root partition per OS is all that's necessary, plus a shared ESP and shared swap.

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