Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I would think you could put /usr on a separate disk just fine, as long as it was available to mount at boot time.
How small is your SSD that you're trying weird stuff to save space? Even in the tens of gigs should be enough to run Ubuntu. I just checked two full desktop systems, and they are 32 and 24 GB used for the root partition.
I'm just irresponsible with installing software on my desktop machine. It's a 50g partition but I use it for music, software development, and some games (looking at you flightgear) which eventually add up. I've been slowly moving pieces of the setup onto a 3tb rust gyroscope with mostly success. Luckily this blunder was recoverable and I'm back to where I was before
I’m not too familiar with Ubuntu, but the arch wiki has a section about moving /usr to a separate partition: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinitcpio#/usr_as_a_separate_partition
Maybe using these instructions, you can still offload /usr to a mechanical drive.
Just out of curiosity, how large is your /usr directory? Mine is only 30GiB (arch Linux, kde plasma with all apps + hyprland), which only takes up 17GiB on my disk due to btrfs compression (zstd level 15).
Ohh I like the sound of that compression ratio, I'll have to look into it. I'm just using ext4, plus I should repartition the whole disk I'm throwing away another 50Gb keeping my home partition on the SSD...
My /usr is 35Gb but I'm squeezing Ubuntu into a 50Gb partition and between docker, snapd, postgres, apt, and Minecraft it's hitting 100% weekly.
Im pretty sure it would be fine if i was trying to dedicate a whole partition to /usr, maybe that's the right answer after all
Have you considered btrfs compression?
Not until now! Isn't there some lore around btrfs or something...
the lore is that it's fucking great
Damn that's awesome