Here’s an overview of how Linux reads its filesystems on boot:

1. You press the power button on your PC.
2. Your motherboard receives power and begins a process called Power-On Self-Test, or POST. This is essentially the motherboard “feeling out” on all of its ports to see what’s connected. It senses all of your hard drive(s).
3. The motherboard picks one of the partitions on one of the connected drives and tries to run it as an operating system. For a linux system, you want this to be /boot.
4. /boot finds your actual system partition and tries to spin up the OS using it. This partition becomes the “main” one you’ll see by default when it’s fully up and running.
5. At some point in the boot process, Linux checks the contents of the file at /etc/fstab. “fstab” here is short for “file system table”. It’s basically a list of other partitions plugged into your PC, and a mapping of where it should be mounted in your filesystem. If your system partition was Partition A, for example, and you had another Partition B that you want to be accessed at the path /B, you’d add a line to your fstab file that says something to the effect of, “hey, reach out to the connected partition with ID <long id string>, and if it’s there, create the folder /B, and make the files inside of the partition show up there.” This is called “mounting” the filesystem. You can do it manually at any time with the mount command. The fstab file is just a way to get Linux to auto-mount permanent partitions on startup. You can mount any drive to any path, including /home.

What you need to do is:

1. Format your new drive, and create a new partition there.
2. Mount the new partition with the mount command. Park it anywhere you want. /media/new_home or whatever you like. This will just be a temporary place.
3. Copy everything from your /home directory to the newly mounted one.
4. Move the existing /home folder to literally anyplace else than where it currently is. \home_old would do. It just needs to be out of the way. You almost certainly want to do this only when logged in as the root user, or from another OS running off a USB. You will not be able to log in as any user after you do this until you finish the following steps.
5. Edit your /etc/fstab file to point your new home partition to the path /home. This will “hook up” the new partition.
6. Reboot to make Linux mount the new partition.
7. Verify everything works.
8. Delete the backup home directory.

Answering some of your questions:

Can /home live on a separate drive from the system partition?

Yes. Linux does not care in the slightest where any mounted drives are. A drive is a drive is a drive. If it mounts, it mounts. Just make sure it’s in your fstab file.

How should I organize my partitions?

There is no right answer. It depends entirely on what you need and how you intend to use your PC. But since that answer is unhelpful, I’ll tell you how I’ve done mine. I currently have a single 2TiB SSD split up like this:

[ 200 MB boot | ~500 GB system | 2 GB free | ~1.5 TiB home | 8 GB swap ]

Boot comes first and is tiny. System is probably an order of magnitude bigger than it ought to be, but whatever. 2 GB of deliberately unallocated space is there for the exceedingly rare situation where a dumb bug chews up all the storage on the system partition rendering it un-runnable; it’s emergency expansion space I can tack on to get it running just long enough to resolve the problem. Home gets the lion’s share. And swap goes at the end, where home can cannibalize it if some day I decide I don’t need so much swap space.

You would probably organize your drives in a similar way, except one drive would be entirely dedicated to /home and nothing else, and system taking up the bulk of the other drive. That would be the easy and naive solution. Some users may be inclined to create other partitions for organizational purposes. I personally don’t care for that organizational pattern, so, w/e.

I cannot help you with your display troubles. :(

1. Your home partition can be anywhere, I would recommend copying the files to your new drive and adding a /home mountpoint flag in the kde partition manager.

2. See above

3. The newest hotness is something like btrfs and pooling drives together under the same mountpoint. Otherwise just do what you were planning, a big root partition and a 1TiB home partition.

4. Probably related to nouveau drivers

5. https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

You can have /home on a separate drive without any problem, it can even be a network drive versus physically attached.

Format the drive, copy the contents of the current /home, mount the new drive as /home.

/boot and /var are usually separate for good reason. The short version is: you don’t want to mess up /boot and you don’t want /var to fill up and use up all the space in / if it isn’t separate. Most of the everyday growing/changing data on your machine lives in /var.

To answer your disk question, you first must understand how Fedora sets up the disk.

Fedora uses the btrfs filesystem with 2 subvolumes (virtual volumes) called root and home. As you can imagine, root is your os and home is your home directory.

To move those volumes you can use btrfs send and btrfs received. You need to do more research into how those commands work but long story short they are just fancy file copies. You also will want the new disk formated as btrfs

Once you have moved your data you will need to update the boot so that it can mount your disks. If you don’t you will end up in either a grub recovery shell or initramfs.

Another option is to use dd to copy your data to another drive. dd is a simple program that reads raw data and then writes it. It doesn’t have any safe guards so it will happily wipe out important data if you mess up the syntax. Use at your own risk.

Your filesystem mountpoints are in /etc/fstab. Moving your home is a matter of adding a line there, with your other disk, and /home as mountpoint and rebooting or running “mount -a”. (You will probably want to ask around about the details when you decide to do it.)

Also, as soon as you mount it, whatever is on /home will be masked. Don’t despair, it’s still there, but it’s better to rename it beforehand (“mv /home /home-old”) and create a new directory for it (“mkdir /home”).

Running your system with a / and /home partitions only is perfectly fine. Don’t fall for the people that claim there’s a single right way to partition your disks.

NVidia GPUs are notorious troublemakers. Expect to always have something about it in need of fixing.

Can I partition /home directory in a different drive and still fuction?

Yes, that is the recommended thing to do.

Transferring /home directory without reinstalling Linux?

Not a problem, just format your other partition and add/change an entry on /etc/fstab, next time you reboot the home will be in the new partition. For how to write this line check out how the other lines are written, it’s essentially the UUID of the partition (or sometimes it’s name, but that’s discouraged since the name depends on the order the drives are plugged), some options and the location to mount the partition. Should be straightforward to copy the one for / to write a /home one.

Best way to partition my / and /home directories?

Just format your partition and add it to fstab. The other things are for doing the same with other folders.

Fedora KDE refresh rate seems broken?

Nouveau is not great, NVIDIA is a shitshow and hamper open source development actively, but their proprietary drivers mostly “work”, so I would just install those.

Downloading NVIDIA drivers on Fedora KDE?

No idea, they should be in the package manager though.

Linux is usually very flexible. /home is just the standard, but you could configure for example your user A to use /home/a/ as home and configure your user B to use /home2/b/ which you have saved on a USB drive that you normally will not connect. You can check this for yourself by looking at the /etc/passwd file with a text editor. Your user C can e.g. have its home in /var/lib/my-fancy-home/c/

Years ago some Linux howtos or Linux distributions during their installation recommended to have several different partitions (I believe some of the BDSs like OpenBSD still offer such an option during installation). One advantage of that for /home is that you can have different mount options like noexec for preventing the execution of files inside your home directory which can be a good security measure. But I am not sure what the impact is for KDE and GNOME desktop files as launchers. These need to be executable files.

I’m not going to address the Fedora/KDE specific questions because I’m more of a generalist.

Can I partition /home directory in a different drive and still fuction?

Transferring /home directory without reinstalling Linux?

Best way to partition my / and /home directories?

Take the time to learn how Symbolic Links or Symlinks work. Once you have that down, you can pretty much put whatever you want, wherever you want.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/symlink-tutorial-in-linux-how-to-create-and-remove-a-symbolic-link/

https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/linux-for-bioinformatics/0/steps/201767

https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/creating-and-removing-symbolic-links-symlinks/

You can definitely move your home wherever you want. Mount your new home wherver you want and copy files using rsync -a /home/$USER /mnt/newhome/ or cp -ar …. The a param (in both) is for also copying permission modes/owners. Do it as root. After having that done, setup mountpoint in your fstab.

Having / and /home on separate partitons is something you can do, and something some people recommend (it allows you to reinstall your OS or try a new one without moving your personal files around).

It’s not that hard to set up, but it’s easier with the terminal. Are you comfortable with using the terminal and command line?

With the card thing, just as a shot in the dark, are you using HDMI or Displayport? I know that older versions of the HDMI spec had trouble with high resolution and refresh rate monitors. But I think the propriety driver is just recommended nowadays for Nvidia in general.

KDE and Gnome both use the same drivers, so if it’s the same underlying distro (I’m not that sure about the Fedora side), the same instructions should just hopefully work.

With the black box, you should do a report, the advantage of this is if you do it, and a developer actually addresses it, it’ll be solved for everyone, meaning your only troubleshooting step will be waiting for an update:

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/Bugs.html

It’d help them out too, and that’s also a very likely spot to get troubleshot, as the devs are very knowledgeable.

Unfortunately the situation with nvidia is just horrible ATM because nvidia won’t stop being horrible.

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For the home directory question, you actually don’t have to reboot at all. You’ll do most of this as the root user. Just create a new user and put its home directory somewhere like /tmp. Logout, log back in as your temp user, format the new drive, move your home directory (rsync is your friend), edit the fstab (I personally prefer labeling all my partitions and using the labels in fstab). After that, to test your settings, create a new, empty, /home matching the permissions of the old directory. Then type “mount -a”. This goes back through fstab and mounts everything listed if it’s not already mounted. Look for your home directory in /home. If it’s there, you should be able to “su - yourusername” and if you are in your home directory with all your files, you’re all good. No need to reboot. Log out of the temp user account, log back in as you and delete the temp user.

Thank you @[email protected] for asking these questions, and for everyone giving answers. I was trying to plan out my proxmox installation, and you’ve all pointed me in the right direction.

Transferring /home directory without reinstalling Linux?

After running low on storage space on Windows 10 I have considered upgrading to a larger drive, 2-4 TiB. With my switch to Linux I’d like to know if there is an easy way to take all my files from my previous drive into the new one with all the correct paths configured, without reinstalling Linux?

I can see this meaning a number of different things:

1. you want to move your home directory to a separate partition: You can just create a new partition and move your stuff there. People have suggested rsync, and that’s fine. Personally, I’d use mc (midnight commander) for that because it’s easier.

2. you want to know how to transfer your future home partition to a future bigger drive: You could do as above, or you could use clonezilla for that.

3. you want to transfer files from your old Windows setup to your new Linux system: You can just mount an NTFS partition and do as described under point 1. I’d be wary to write to an NTFS partition, but reading from it works just fine.