Fedora 33: recover disk space from swap partitions, and other tips for upgrading

As described in detail by Andy Grover in the article Upgrading to Fedora 33: Removing Your Old Swap File on EFI Machine, Fedora 33 defaults to using a compressed-memory-based swap device using zram. There is no swap partition any more!

It’s time to reclaim that disk space. If you follow the guide in the linked article, you will successfully delete the swap partition but the disk space will remain unused.

Here’s what I did to extend my home partition by 8 GB, which I found good since it’s only 200 GB.

Fedora used LVM by default for all releases previous to 33. The commands are those that modify the “physical volume” (pvresize), the “logical volume” (lvextend) and finally the actual filesystem (resize2fs). “volgroup” and “logvol” are example labels for the LVM items, and they may be different on your system.

pvresize /dev/sda3
lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/volgroup/logvol
resize2fs /dev/volgroup/logvol

Please make sure you have backups before doing anything that modifies disk partitions and filesystems!

nano as default editor

Fedora 33 has nano as default editor for new installs. This means you get nano instead of vi even for git commit messages. To obtain the same default if you’re upgrading from Fedora 32 or earlier, install the package nano-default-editor.

I have nothing against vi but nano is definitely easier to work with for occasional text editing in the terminal.