I have been using Ubuntu for a few years and usually my partition set up was the following:
Ext3 or Ext4 partition for the system itself (20 GB);
A 10 GB swap partition;
a big FAT32 partition to store movies, photos, work stuff, etc. (depends on the capacity of the disk, but usually it is what is left from Ext3+Swap, currently it is more than 200
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