Environment

Hardware

I am using Arch Linux on my laptop because it gives me a functional system while having low resource usage. I am using an old Lenovo G50-70 laptop with an Intel Core i3-4030U, 4GB RAM, and 500GB HDD storage.

Software

Disk Partitions

During the installation I’ve configured my machine to have the following disk partitions:

DeviceSizeMountpointFilesystemLabelDescription
/dev/sda1600M/mnt/boot/efiFAT32EFIThe EFI partition
/dev/sda21G/mnt/bootEXT4BOOTThe boot partition
/dev/sdaX2GZRAMZRAMZRAMOptional, The device for ZRAM writeback
/dev/sdaYRemaining of the device/mntBtrfsARCHThe root and home parition

If your machine has a RAM size of 8GB or lower, I recommend that you create a separate partition for ZRAM, /dev/sdaX, as its backing device. /dev/sdaY will be a Btrfs filesystem with the following subvolumes:

SubvolumeDescription
/mnt/@The root partition
/mnt/@homeThe home partition
/mnt/@var_logThe partition for system logs
/mnt/@snapshotsThe partition for system snapshots

Important Note

The suffixes X and Y in /dev/sda_ are placeholders! They could be /dev/sda3, /dev/sda4, and so on… Check fdisk -l to confirm.