Comment 15 for bug 1465050

It's possible to customize the size of the /boot partition on a Desktop system by using the (poorly-named, IMHO) "Something Else" partitioning option; however, this also requires explicitly setting up all other partitions. This can be a rather high hurdle for inexperienced users. Of course, such users aren't likely to understand the subtleties of partition sizing requirements in the first place, which comes back to the default sizing of the partition.

Although fixing bug #1357093 will go a long ways toward avoiding this problem, I believe that a reluctance to increase the default size of /boot is misplaced. I *STRONGLY* disagree with Steve's comment that "the lifespan of the release is not part of the equation" -- because resizing partitions is a non-trivial task, the possibility of changing needs over the lifespan of an installation is *EXTREMELY* relevant. A sudden increase in the size of kernels or a need to install some new big files (maybe something related to GRUB) in /boot could render a formerly adequately-sized partition inadequate. There are also questions of supporting reasonable uses that aren't typical, such as extra debugging kernels or even locally-compiled kernels. Thus, we're looking at a question of adequate safety margins. To some extent this is a judgement call, but it appears to me that the current size (244 MiB when I filed this bug report, at least on my test system) is now inadequate. Doubling that size would provide enough breathing room that anybody wanting a still larger size could reasonably be expected to perform manual partitioning. I have yet to hear a good argument AGAINST raising the default size of /boot -- even a small modern SSD is likely to be ~100 GB, so a ~500 MB /boot would be about 0.5% of total disk space. If there's a concern about installation to truly tiny media like USB flash drives, perhaps that should be a special case in which the size of /boot is reduced, but for the vast majority of installations, increasing the default size of /boot to ~500 MB has NO disadvantages and considerable advantages. (Also, if tiny USB flash drives are a concern, remember that this issue affects installations that use a separate /boot -- mainly LVM, RAID, and encrypted installations. It's doubtful that LVM or RAID would have much benefit on a USB flash drive, although encryption might be.)