[ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 16:44:05 -0500
Narahari Lakshminarayana via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Friends:
> 
> I am installing DEBIAN on my ASUS motherboard based desktop.
> I am at the stage where it is asking me to partition the disks.
> 
> NVMe-1 blank 256GB
> NVMe-2 Window 11 exists from broken laptop 256GB
> 
> Does it make sense to install LVM ?
> 
> What does it get me ?

If I were in your shoes I'd just use NVMe-1 as a single partition, /,
for your Debian install, and maybe a second partition for swap (or you
could use a swap file). That way you don't need to mess with LVM or
unchangeable partition sizes, or RAID, or any additional complexity.

LVM is complicated. Yes, it can be mastered, but how many complications
do we want in our lives? And when something breaks, LVM makes it
harder, sometimes much harder, to retrieve your data.

Let's say someday you wanted A LOT of disk space. You could buy a 7200
RPM 12TB spinning rust, put one partition on it, and for each mount
point you might have desired, just put a directory on the spinning rust
and bind mount that directory to the mount point you desired. It's like
a partition with rubber walls. Yeah, you can't use this technique for
things that must be mounted earlier than the execution of the program
that works with /etc/fstab, but really, you should have /etc and /usr
on your root partition anyway in almost all cases.

I use high quality Western Digital drives, not those garbage Seagates,
so I usually go at least 5 years between drive failures. And by 10
years, the drive is obsolete anyway so I bring it out to the driveway
and hammer it into tiny pieces. So for me, a good backup system is
sufficient, and if a drive croaks, I can reinstall Linux and then
restore my data. My opinion: Life's too short for all these layers of
abstraction.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques