Hello Walter Dnes,

>   This setup is for a desktop PC that has "a user" not "a bunch of
> users".  I am *NOT* running a server with a bunch of users.  If I was,
> I'd be using quotas to prevent the problem described above.

It only takes one user to have a runaway process, or even just one that
uses more space than you expected, that fills /home. there are good
reasons for separating user and system filesystems.

>   d) more partitions means more things to go wrong

More partitions mean that when things go wrong, the effects are limited.

Why do you make such a big deal of not using LVM? It achieves everything
you want to, and more, without the compromises.

> > you can't use different filesystems for different purposes, etc.  
> 
>   You mean like ext2fs for a small rarely-written-to partition and
> reiserfs for a gigantic partition with lots of files?

How about ReiserFS for a general purpose partition or one that has a lot
of small files and XFS for a partition that has a small number of very
large files (XFS's performance is much better than Reiser's with
multi-gigabyte files). How about a separate partition for large temporary
files (think video processing and DVD authoring) so it doesn't fill up
your home or system directories.

There are many reasons to want to keep data on a separate filesystem,
which LVM achieves but your approach does not permit.

And what happens with 500GB is no longer enough and you want to add more
space. How do you resize your "partitions" to use space on the second
disk?


-- 
Neil Bothwick

There's more to life than sex, beer and computers.
Not a lot more admittedly...