I can make it work, but I don’t have a clear idea of what I’m doing especially with the partitions. I`m still too used to thinking in drive letters.
Everything is a file. You can control all of your hardware just by writing data to different files.
On Windows you have C, D and COM1, COM2
On Linux and other *nixes you normally have /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1 and /dev/ttyUSB0
this doesn’t help at all
Edit to clarify: You’re just explaining back-end stuff that should be completely invisible to users (and normally is). The parent comment specifically mentioned partitions, when you install a new Linux OS the installer asks you “how do you want your drive split up? where do you want the swap, and how much?” etc etc. which a newbie can’t even begin to answer, it shouldn’t even ASK that if the user didn’t specifically choose to set this completely manually.
As another commentor said most Linux distros will do that for you.
If you still aren’t sure then the answer is generally: swap should be at least as big as you have RAM at least if you want to hibernate. If you don’t want to hibernate then you can make it smaller but it might impact system performance when low on memory.
For file systems they will often offer you LVM or ZFS or occasionally BTRFS as options. These all allow you to make system snapshots (like the concept of restore points in Windows). If you like the idea of that then say yes, otherwise you will get slightly better performance not using those systems. ZFS and BTRFS also have other uses like RAID-like functionality and detecting and possibly correcting data corruption - with only one drive these features are not as useful though.
BCacheFS is new to the mainline kernel and does much the same as ZFS and BTRFS, when distros start offering this as a supported option it’s probably a good idea to use this, kind of unfinished at the moment though.
Edit: also if it asks if you want a separate /home generally you want to say no. Unless it’s a btrfs subvolume or zfs dataset in which case say yes.
It’s not exactly backend. It’s how UNIX like OSes work. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to learn this. The idea behind what @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip said was (IMO) better have this in the back of your mind when it comes to Linux, cuz you’re gonna need it sooner or later. Just keep it tucked away for when the time comes.
To be fair, I haven’t thought about the USB low-levei devices in years. Nowadays most things just work, and if they don’t you do a quick lsusb to check it actually sees the device then you Google what package you need to install.
That’s actually one of my biggest gripes with Linux, it seems very difficult to keep track of physical drives and their mount points for when you need to swap things out. I still find it a bit cumbersome, and I’ve been using Linux since 2005.
I prefer monolithic systems because I can put the discs wherever I want. Using lsblk or just the mount command you get a list of all the mountpoints of different devices.
Admittedly, the names of the devices can be confusing but it’s something I have gotten accustomed to.
mount
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sys on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
dev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=8141320k,nr_inodes=2035330,mode=755,inode64)
run on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,mode=755,inode64)
efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
/dev/sdb2 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
cgroup2 on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate,memory_recursiveprot)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
bpf on /sys/fs/bpf type bpf (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=37,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=22556)
tracefs on /sys/kernel/tracing type tracefs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,pagesize=2M)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,noatime,inode64)
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/tera-home type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sdb1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1629900k,nr_inodes=407475,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1001,inode64)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1001)
portal on /run/user/1000/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1001)
Yes I can see that’s very convenient for seeing your drives. 😜
You don’t need to. It is handled automatically. When I plug in a drive it mounts automatically. If I want to unmount or mount partitions I just open up gnome disks and click the toggle mount button.
Under the hood I believe it is just udev rules I think.
You don’t need to. It is handled automatically.
No it’s not, and you still need to identify what data is on what drive when swapping. I am not aware of a distro where a drive is auto-mounted with write privileges after you install it.
