Fresh install

Last weekend I installed Debian Trixie on my newest desktop, and couldn't be happier. I've always loved Debian, but for a while my hardware was too new for the kernels available at the time. Now I've got full hardware support on Linux 6.12.

I was using an arch-based distro, Manjaro, prior to this. More than once I found myself chrooting into my system from a LiveCD to fix a broken install following a package manager update.

new fs, btrfs!

This had always been the plan, my last install would be temporary and fleeting. Now on this Debian install, I opted for btrfs for my filesystem. I've set up snapshotting so I can more easily rollback or backup my system using btrfs features.

I've setup subvolumes in btrfs like this:

/ (@)
|_ /home (@home)
|_ /var/log (@var_log)
|_ /mnt/data (@data)
|_ /mnt/games (@games) [copy-on-write disabled]

My root is on one drive (1TB), and /mnt/data and /mnt/games are on their own 2 TB drives. I consdiered using LVM to bring the 2 physical volumes from /mnt/data and /mnt/games into one logical volume of 4TB--but I thought, why? If one drive were to fail, I'd likely lose data across both drives.

My /mnt/games directory is where my Steam library will live. Given these files are all from a remote service, easily replacable, and I have zero reason to perform backups of them, that I would disalbe all the useful features of btrfs as they don't serve me here.

/mnt/data is for storing excessive data, such as media, or any projects I may work on like video/audio editing etc.

thin clients

These days, a lot of important data is duplicated in the cloud and easily restored to any device. This has made reinstalling my personal PC's OS a breeze. I think before, I would really stress myself out trying to make sure every file was saved, just in case I might need it in the future.

Moving apartments, is similar.. I'm a lot more keen to just throw things away that I haven't seen or thought about for over a year than when I was younger.

That said.. I hope that I won't be reinstalling my OS again any time soon! I'm fairly happy with this setup now.