@andrew.46 Hello, Thanks for your thoughts. Would you believe that I do not know what a swap is or what it is for. I have seen the term used many times. Can you tell me what a swap is?

@MichaelLevy I'm not @andrew.46 but its essentially virtual memory - cache on the hard drive for less used ram

the 'traditional' unix way of doing things is many many paritions for reasons like smaller hard disks and easy backups. The 'traditional' ubuntu install has one root partition and a swap one, but some folks prefer swap files (ala windows)

@MichaelLevy And if you are relatively new to Ubuntu perhaps just go with the defaults for the moment on installation and in your spare time create a Virtual Machine with Ubuntu and experiment with partitioning there. If you break a VM it does not matter so much :)

@JourneymanGeek In my Slackware world I experimented with swap as zram but I eventually decided to use my computer rather than stuffing around with it. And bought more RAM :)

@andrew.46 swap files are not zram but you can "easily" adjust swap size and have a single partition

slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/swapinzram

This dependencies are a pain

@MichaelLevy 1 if you want. 2 / and a datapartition if you want (so no need for /home if you put your personal stuff on the data part.