Hard Disk Space for Debian 10

Question

I am using windows 10 on my laptop. I am planning to switch to Debian 10 GNOME  Desktop. The major software which I want to install in Debian are GIMP,Inkscape, and Kdenlive.
By using a manual partition in Debian 10 how much space may I allow for Debian? I have 1 TB Hard Disk  so
/boot  = 1GB
 Swap  = Double of Ram Size
/home = As per user requirement
/     = ? GB

For root partition technically how much size may I allow for the above Softwares? 70 GB for root partition is sufficient?
If I try with an example suppose windows 10 needs 20 GB hard disk space for installation, for the rest of the software above mention  I will make my C drive partition 150 GB.
I hope I try to explain my question.
Thanks

ctrl-alt-delor · Answer

I have 20GB (11GB currently in use) for the / partition. I have no separate /boot it is not needed (it was used in the past, for compatibility with firmware that could not boot past some block number).
I do have /opt, /var/cache/apt, and /usr/local sym-linked into /home. (Total 2.3GB as of today, so probably not needed. I did /opt and /usr/local because they should not be replace when I upgrade to a now Distro/version. /var/cache/apt was done to minimise downloads of net packages after an upgrade.)
I have all the packages, that you mention, installed, plus many others, except KDE plasma, not Gnome.

Artem S. Tashkinov · Answer

20GB for Windows 10 is way too little. I'd recommend that you allocate at the very least 80GB for it.

64GB will be more than enough for the Debian root partition (/). That much space will be enough to install all desktop environment simultaneously and tons of software and have a lot of space left.

Swap double the RAM size is something you've read in very old computer books. Depending on your RAM and the need to hibernate you may go without SWAP at all. In fact I stopped using SWAP altogether at the very least 15 years ago. We run high-load high-availability servers at my work and even for them we decided to go without SWAP because in most cases it affects performance and brings very little benefits.

You may allocate all the rest for your home partition but remember that Windows 10 doesn't have a reliable read-write ext4 driver. Linux currently supports NTFS/fat32/exfat a lot better than Windows supports ext4.

In my experience 200MB UEFI system partition (fat32) is more than enough. I currently have Windows 10 and Fedora 32 co-installed and the EFI system partition has just 40MB worth of boot loaders.

It would be best to have a separate /boot partition (ext4) for Linux. 500MB could be enough for it.

Hard Disk Space for Debian 10

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