With the new computer and the newer Microsoft Windows updates they have really jam packed their OS with bloat and spyware. That being said I have no idea what I’m doing with Linux, need help with where to start.? What are some general tips? I understand there’s a lot of prebuilt Linux distributions or something what are some first timer friendly ones? Really any help is appreciated because the biggest barrier to entry is the perceived difficulty of actually doing it.
But doesn’t APT or Pacman install to root folders? Like when I say I want just the OS on the SSD I really mean it.
Yeah, they’re installing software.
Everything below / is the OS. There isn’t an analog to C:\Windows in *nix-like operating systems.
The closest thing to a pure separation would be an immutable distro like Silverblue or MicroOS.
What are you trying to separate from the OS files? If it’s just personal documents and stuff like that, I don’t see why you can’t just keep those in your home directory. Or are you saying you want your installed programs separate from the Linux kernel? Then you can just put the boot partition on one drive and have the root partition on the other (including home). I guess I’m just a little confused as to what it is you’re trying to separate here. What do you mean when you say “separate from the OS”?
Usually each distro decides which packages go in / and which in /usr based on how critical, more or less, a package is to the system. It’s often not very easy to configure these choices because it affects other distro decisions, including filesystem structure and paths, and boot sequence. Beware that “just the OS” on a typical distribution is usually a lot less functionality than you get with “just” Windows NT.
There’s also /usr/local for packages you install on your own, apart from the distro package manager, and /opt, for closed source binary only packages or for anything else that doesn’t want to conform to the bin, lib, include, share schema.