> Could someone enlighten me on the advantage of multiple partitions? It
> seems that for flexibility, the large partition would always be better.
> I assume that I'm missing something though.
For personal machines, I don't see any advantage. On production machines,
things are usually split up for a couple different reasons:
* Physical differences. /home may be an NFS mount or a RAID array, while
/var is generally a local, (relatively) unreliable disk. In general,
/var holds unimportant transient things, with the interesting exception of
mail spools.
* Adminsitrative differences. On Pantheon, /home (as well as other
user-writable spaces, like /tmp and /scratch) is mounted 'nosuid',
preventing end users from creating setuid executables, while /usr/local is
mounted with setuid programs enabled. Different partitions can also be
mounted read-only, for example.
* Physical quotas. Maybe you don't want user-specific quotas, but you
want to make sure that your users collectively can't crash the system. The
easiest way to do this is to give them a separate physical partition to
write to. (This scales well -- that is, you can give particular groups
different partitions instead of using group quotas, etc. It might just be
easier to visualize than software quotas in some situations.)
* Backup and upgrade simplicity, though this is a judgment call. It's
arbuably easier to upgrade a system by reformatting and reinstalling an OS
in system space and leaving /home alone. Simply destroy and recreate
/usr, /etc, and so on, leaving /usr/local and /home (or whatever else is
customized on your machine) alone.
Shawn