In most cases you are going to want to make seperate partitions for each of the following mount points:

• / (root)

• /boot or /boot/efi

• /home

• swap

/ is the top-level directory. Everything by default will be placed here unless a different file system is mounted in the path being written to, such as /home.

For a minimal installation 10-15 GiB will do, but if you want to make sure you have space for all of your packages 40 GiB is the safest option.

/boot contains all boot related files. In most cases, 1 GiB is enough.

If you have a UEFI capable system, then instead partition for /boot/efi.

/home is used to store user data, such as videos, images and documents. This partition is useful to have so that your data is separate from OS files, but isn’t necessary, especially for machines such as servers that don’t have users storing their files.

swap is used when there isn’t enough RAM available. If you run out of RAM and have no swap the kernel will start terminating processes, which will most likely lead to data loss.

Too much swap is usually a waste of storage space and can enable it to hide memory leaks.

If you want to use hibernation mode, you will have to have at least as much swap as you do RAM, though it is, recommended to have a little extra.