GParted For Linux

If you're a hardcore, command-line-loving, long-time Linux user, then you probably know a thing or two about GNOME Partition Editor.

GParted is an acronym of the aforementioned GNOME Partition Editor, and it's actually a GTK front-end (GUI) for the GNU Parted command-line app.

With the help of GParted, you can resize, copy, and manage partitions without data loss. For example, you can grow or shrink certain partitions, create space for new OSes, and even attempt data rescue from lost partitions.

You can create, delete, resize, move, check, label, copy, and paste partitions, as well as set new UUIDs (Universal Unique Identifiers).

One of the best aspects of GParted is that it works on all three major OSes out there: Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions. What's more, the app also works with a plethora of storage devices.

These include hard disk drives (such as SATA, IDE, and SCSI), flash memory devices (USB memory disks, SSDs, and non-volatile memory express devices, NVMes), RAID devices (hardware RAID, motherboard BIOS RAID, and Linux-specific RAID software).

It also supports all sector sizes which means it can be used on devices with 512, 1024, 2048, 4096-byte sectors.

Since the GNU Parted works successfully on many Linux distros, it's no surprise that it supports a plethora of filesystems such as Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, SWAP, XFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, NILFS2, F2FS, JFS, LVM2 (Logical Volume Manager) PV, and UFS (Unix File System).

What's even more impressive is that it also works with several Windows-specific filesystems such as FAT16, FAT32, ExFAT, and NTFS.

GParted has a lot to offer for its users. It's a very capable little app that supports a plethora of filesystems, many sector sizes, and storage devices. This makes it one of the most versatile disk partition utilities out there, even though it may not be the perfect fit for absolute beginners.

The fact that it's OS independent is also a plus, and so is the fact that it never requires a reboot to commit changes.

The most obvious downside is that it doesn't do everything by default. To be more precise, for example, you might need to manually install various packages to make GParted perfectly capable of working with some file systems (btrfs-progs for Btrfs, exfat-utils for exFAT, f2fs-tools for F2FS, nilfs-utils for NILFS2, etc.).

It's also not what one might call a small app, since the archives are all over 400 MB. Another drawback is the fact that the app can only be used after burning it to a disc or USB device - meaning it's a bootable disk partition tool.

If you plan on using GParted, here's what you should be looking out for: remember that you can undo almost any operation, but the app is not capable of redoing the operations in question. Secondly, please note that editing partitions may cause potential loss of data, therefore, it's advisable that you backup your data beforehand, just to be on the safe side.