Charles__L

Yeah, it's the most do-it-yourself but is pretty difficult if your not extremely comfortable with Linux. I tried to do it a few months back (without too much C knowledge) and couldn't figure out how to cross-compile/link libraries I needed. I got it to boot into a shell (without login). At this point, I could probably do it, but I prefer sticking with really minimal distros like CRUX and Void.

There are a few reasons they split off home and root. It makes recovery simpler, and allows you to share the partition between multiple environments - which is useful if you dual boot.

I personally rarely make a second partition for home, but I always make a separate partition for /boot. GRUB requires an separate EFI partition to install (which is kind of dumb), and if you decide to encrypt your disk, the boot directory cannot be encrypted.

I think the reason they put swap in these tutorials is that many times people install linux on low-powered machines that require the swap because of limited memory. It's not a requirement to install linux, though. I never run it on installation.