I've installed ArchLinux yesterday and set up a 10 GB partition for the root file system, 256 MB for swap, and the rest (456 GB) for my /home.
However I still have 4.0 GB left on my root file system after installing some packages (GNOME, Firefox, Thunderbird etc…) and running a pacman clear cache.
Does it suffice to have 10 GB for root file system, or could I end up running out of space in a couple of weeks/months?
Best Answer
I usually make my root partition sizes for some of the distributions I run around 40 GB and haven't gone less than 20GB.
It really depends on the operating system, display/window manager, and intended use. My intended use is Geographic Information Systems so this can involve installing several extra packages often exceeding several GBs (10+) in disk space once finished.
KDE/GNOME based distros I try to set a 40GB root partition because there are lots of widgets and add-ons available so its good to provide some disk space overhead for those.
Lightweight distros like LXDE, XFCE, icewm for example I can usually get away with a 20GB root partition.
My $.02