On May 5, 2015 10:35 AM, "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro@gnome.org> wrote:
>
> I've had the opposite experience. I've never figured out how to
> multiboot after installing Fedora with LVM, since other distros'
> installers just can't handle it, nor do any standard partition
> management tools.

Can you give me some examples of other distro installers and layouts they couldn't handle?  Just for my own edification, I have a WIP multiboot guide.

> I've no doubt LVM is great if you're familiar with
> how it works, but I have no intention of taking the time to figure out
> the different command line tools, nor do I plan to install another
> disk management application when we already have one part of our core
> OS.
>
> On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 09:45 -0600, Pete Travis wrote:
> > I'm not sure who benefits from removing it, aside from folks that
> > decide to only use gnome-disks for filesystem and partition
> > management.  This multiboot crowd is your mindshare generator, try
> > to make it easy for them.
>
> Um, I think we should indeed assume that folks use only GNOME Disks
> for filesystem and partition management... if we aren't prepared to
> make that assumption, we shouldn't be installing it by default.
>
> The other common tool is gparted, which can't handle LVM either. I
> think I tried KDE's partition manager once and it had similar
> problems, but don't remember for sure.
>
> I think it's important for LVM to be an option in the installer, for
> users who find it useful. But I see a very compelling case to use
> standard partitions by default when disk encryption is not selected.
> (On the other hand, we really ought to have full disk encryption by
> default....)
>
> Michael
> --

My sense is that there would be less *need* for partition and filesystem management tools with LVM, but to be fair, I'm the guy that suspects that 90% of the people using gparted do so because "I like /home to be on /dev/sda3" or some other arbitrary personal preference. 

I can *definitely* say I've encountered a bunch of situations where the user had an MBR drive with valuable data  on the fourth partition.  Anaconda won't (wouldn't?) create an extended partition anywhere else, so they have room for one, maybe two partitions.  They *want* boot, root, swap, home, maybe more.   The installer doesn't really explain the inherent restrictions in this situation, and arguably should not.  With LVM, this layout is probably fine; without, you are going to need partitioning tools and expertise to even start the installation.  The complex layer of storage abstraction is actually exposing less complexity to the user, in this case. 

+1 for encryption by default, although I'll defer to others on the ideal implementation.  That change would be marketable and valuable to end users, looking forward to the F23 Change proposal for it.

--Pete