I originally meant to ask if having /home on a different partition or separate physical device was still warranted, but my ignorance in this matter slowly became apparent.

This is my current setup:

• sda is a 240G SATA SSD that only contains the ESP and the root partition.
• sdb is a 1T SATA SSD entirely dedicated to games and virtual machines.
• sdc is a 3T SATA spinning rust disk mounted on /home, with a 0.5T partition for Timeshift backups.

I recently bought a 2T M.2 NVMe SSD. I’d like to retire sda and sdc (i.e. put them in my junk NAS/backup server), and then reinstall the OS on the new NVMe. My ideas for the new setup:

• I use the entire NVMe drive for ESP and root, no separate /home partition, and mount the 1T SSD as before.
• I use the entire NVMe for ESP and root, move the games and VMs to the root, and use the 1T SSD as the /home partition.
• ESP, ~100-200G root partition, and separate /home partition on the NVMe; games stay on the separate SSD.

The advantages of having /home on a separate device are not lost on me. My question is whether the added complexity is still worth it. I would also like to use LUKS encryption, which I understand to be partition-wide - in which case I’d like to know if there is any significant overhead if I encrypt the root partition. I’m also not opposed to using LVM, but that seems like a little too much for a desktop PC.