I just bought a Dell XPS with Ubuntu pre-installed. I want to install another distribution instead.The system came with the following partitions:Do I need to keep the first two partitions or can I remove those and go for system + swap only?
EFI system partition is it required?
boot;uefi
My wholehearted advice is not to remove these two partitions.The first partition is a EFI system partition and is required for GPT to boot.The second partition has the msftdata flag which identifies a Microsoft Basic Data partition, but is used also for Linux. It is normally formatted with a Microsoft filesystem such as FAT or NTFS, and it usually contains recovery or other metadata. It might not be needed by your system, but considering that it'll give you back just 3 Gb you should not delete or change it blindly.