this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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btrfs subvolumes are cool, but I'll still take partitions for separation. The whole point of having a separate home partition is that it's separate from / if we have to, say, reinstall the OS, or the filesystem breaks or whatever.
sure it might be possible to install an OS into a btrfs subvolume without wiping other subvolumes, but do I wanna risk it? Nah.
-- Frost
That... Is literally how you do it. You install the system onto a subvolume. Or many, in fact - the way I do. Root, var, srv, home, opt all get their own subvolume. Only boot stays as a separate partition.
Ignoring
/boot, what is the benefit of putting everything else in different subvolumes? As opposed to just one subvolume for/and one for/home, which is what I currently have. It just looks to me like it’d be extra work, but I’m probably missing somethingFor one thing if you're snapshotting your subvolumes for backup purposes then it will ignore nested subvolumes. Eg you dont want to preserve snapshots of huge installed game directories, cache directories, logs or docker / podman images, usually. Saves a lot of space.
Also you can tune copy on write on a subvolume, which is great for some use cases for performance.