up vote 1 down vote favorite 
/home (the rest)

/ (100GiB)

/swap (6GiB)

/boot (200MiB

there are vital basic operating system packages like the coreutils and binutils, then there's the "optional" like virtualbox or okular

thing is, I don't want these "optional" packages taking space in my root partition /

Since I consider them to be "user files" and not operating system files

is there a clear way of doing this without getting a million error messages about root sub-directories when installing anything??

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  • 2
    Are you using a RPM or APT based Linux distro? – kemotep Dec 5 at 14:34
  • 1
    @J.Doe: I think you have xyproblem. – Ipor Sircer Dec 5 at 15:29
  • 1
    The solution depends on what kind of package manager you have. It is much easier with RPM to relocate a package. 100 GB for a root partition is pretty large. I understand you want to try to move things away from the root filesystem but have you read up on how the Linux filesystem hierarchy works and why certain files are placed where they are? Since you report using APT as your package manager, the easiest solution would be to create a chroot inside your home directory. So you would have a second environment to install things to that only that use should be able to access. – kemotep Dec 5 at 15:55
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    There is no easy way of doing this with a package manager. You have to manually install the packages. Either manually download and extract the packages and manually copy the relevant parts into $HOME, or build from source with --prefix=/home or --prefix=/home/your_user and add those directories to your $PATH – Panther Dec 5 at 15:56
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    J. Doe, when you want to reply to a Comment, don't comment; instead, please click edit and amplify or extend the original question. Comments pile up and it's difficult to read their content, and by refining your question, it's a lot easier for folks who want to help to understand your goal. – K7AAY Dec 5 at 18:34

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