Ultimate Fedora partition scheme ?

[Valent Turkovic]

Hi,
I'm wondering what tricks do you use when you are creating partition
schemes for your laptop or desktop...

I install Fedora on different laptops, with disks usually with
80-160GB of disk space.

Lets take 120GB for example. If I would like to make partition scheme
that is diverse, dynamic, flexible and secure how would you accomplish
that? Let me expand on what I mean:

diverse
- so that I can have multiple Linux (maybe even windows) distros installed

dynamic and flexible
- so that I can remove partitions, add new ones, reduce and expand
existing partition (doex ext4 support reducing and expanding
parititons or is XFS better ?) with as less hassle as possible

secure
- to encrypt /home partition, maybe even "/" partition for safety and privacy

With 120GB available and with this ideas in mind would this partition
scheme work or you have better ideas:
sda1 ; /boot ; 200MB ; ext3 ; fedora boot
sda2 ; / ; 10GB ; ext4 ; root partition for fedora
sda3 ; / ; 10GB ; ext4 ; root for ubuntu (it doens't need extra /boot partition)
sda5; 100GB ; extended partiton
sda6; 20GB ; PV_1 for LVM (LVM physical volume)
sda7; 20GB ; PV_2 for LVM
sda8; 20GB ; PV_3 for LVM
sda9; 20GB ; PV_4 for LVM
sda10; 20GB ; PV_5 for LVM

then I combine PV_1 - PV_5 physical volumes for my home I can have
upto 100GB /home partition or if needed I can reduce it to 40GB or
even 20BG. And I have more "leg room" for other interesting
partitions, right?

I could also work without sda2 for fedora "/" or use sda2 for some
other system and move fedora "/" to same LV LVM as /home partition.

Would you recommend I do that or how differently would you execute
this? Do you have some tips for me?

How do other distros work with LVM? Do they recognise it and play well
with it? Can I use same /home partition for Fedora, Ubuntu and other
distros? What if I put encryption on that logical volume that has
/home partition, would Ubuntu and other work well with that?

Does ext4 reduce and expand gracefully or should I use XFS if I'm
going to do lot of resizing of my /home partition?

Cheers!

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