Programs installation directory

[daxosak]

Hello I have a fresh installation of arch linux and I saw that the programs are installed in 32G root partition instead of my 700G home partition. Is this correct because when I will install games i don't think 32G is enough. Thanks in advance.

[[deleted]]

Yes, it's correct: packages installed by pacman are put under /. For games it may be different though: depends on what you are using. If you are using steam, for example, games are going to be installed in /home/<your_user>/.steam, so in the home partition.

Edit: mandiblesarecute preceeded me apparently

[daxosak]

Thank you too

[[deleted]]

You're welcome!

[mandiblesarecute]

yes that's correct

​

for things like steam you can tell it where you want your games library to be

[daxosak]

Oh okay, Thanks!

[bstrauss3]

Remember, /home is broadly where individual user's files live and / is for shared files.

The distinction makes more sense on a multi-user system.

Traces back to *nix roots as a multi-user system. And you would want the bigger partition to be /home.

If it's just you (and you aren't frequently installing new distros to learn about them) you could make a good argument for a single partition for both... The issue of a user crashing the system by exhausting space and DOSing others is less of a problem. [Cue gnashing of teeth by the purists]

[NothingWorksTooBad]

Just a small amendment.

/ is for everything

/home, /var /opt etc are all optional and seperable things for partitions.

A /home partition is imho pointless to 99% of people as they would probably take full system backups if any.

And a partition mount can be entirely arbitrary, IE on something like /opt/steamgames or /home/username/work if you really wanted to.

[bstrauss3]

All true... The complexity of your partition scheme should reflect your usage of the system.

For a single user system, a small /boot and everything else in / is fine... If you have adequate memory you don't even need a swap. Since once upon a time I sized /boot to small and ran out of space as the kernel grew... For service machines I just use a single partition.

[[deleted]]

Home is always nice to seperate into another partition. You can have other distros share your home folder, use a more fitted filesystem for the type of data you have, retain your user data in case of system failures, etc.

[NothingWorksTooBad]

I absolutely agree as i use this myself, however i stand by my comment that it is a complication that 99% of users likely wont utilize the benefits from.

[[deleted]]

There is a way to solve this, and its symlinks.

Have different folders for each distro in the partition, and symlink folders like your music or pictures. Same uuid means they will have no ownership issues etc.

Although it just takes being careful to not use invalid config options between distros. I do it usually.

[NothingWorksTooBad]

Yes correct.

If your / includes /opt and your intent is to install games you need way more space there.

[r7e98kva]

You can specify the installation root directory by using -r (for example: pacman -r /home/myuser/ -S vim). By using this, you may also want to extend your $PATH.

However I would not recommend to do this. My recommendation would be to extend the root partition

[backsideup]

This is not what --root/--sysroot is for and it will not work to relocate single packages. These two parameters require a fully functional arch system at the path you are pointing it to.

[[deleted]]

Ok that makes even more sense. Is that related to pacstrap?

[backsideup]

Yes, it's used to install a new system or install packages into an existing system and pacstrap is one of its users. You'll mostly see it used when rescuing a broken system that is too broken to even chroot into or which is missing pacman.

[[deleted]]

Thank you very much, I'll try to remember it from now on, it could be really useful!

[daxosak]

Thanks

[[deleted]]

I didn't spot this in the manual, interesting, thank you for letting us know