Years ago I was very comfortable with a multi partition setup. But on starting an upgrade to OpenSuse 31.2 I have discovered that the machine needed a serious cleanout. So I tried to repartition into SWAP, / and /home. OpenSuse recommended btrfs for / and XFS for /home. I have used XFS for years so no problems. I allocated 20Gb for SWAP and 50Gb for / and the balance to /home. The install has failed because it could not format the BTRFS partition. I expect that in the process the new partition table has been created, so maybe the historical mess is gone. Can someone recommend a "standard" btrfs set up to save me some time, please?
Depends what the machine is doing. Aside from wanting to split / and /home into different filesystems I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap. Especially for a desktop. BTRFS quotas should keep the various subvolumes under control space-wise, if you have that concern. I've noticed that Debian, in the "do everything for me" installation mode seems to put / before swap, which means if it's a VM and you later want to expand the disk, you'd need to shuffle things around a bit. For a VM though, I'd be running btrfs on the hypervisor and then run the VM on NFS, leaving the hypervisor to take the snapshots etc (depending on the VM workload - maybe NFS isn't so good for databases... I haven't checked recently). James