I'd say that it really depends on what you are doing. If you know you will be storing a lot of stuff in /home, make it big. Otherwise, make it small. For me, personally, I like to have a very large /usr/local partition, because I compile a lot of stuff. I chose Slackware, and it doesn't offer a lot of pre-built packages compared to other distributions. My main reason for sticking with Slackware is the Speakup support out of the box, and the simple installer. I also like learning how things work, and with Slackware, you get to do a lot of that. If you don't plan on compiling a lot of programs yourself, then either have no /usr/local partition, or a smaller one. Or, you could just put everything on one big partition, and have another for swap. It's mostly a matter of personal taste.
