universal home partition??

[claydoh at claydoh.com]

> I have a separate partition for /home. I only use a KDE desktop, and
> have exclusively used Kubuntu. After installing 10.04 I had several
> problems with Kubuntu as spoken about in the "impressions of Lucid"
> thread. I now want to try other distros that use KDE. Is there a way of
> keeping my same home partition for other distros? I'm not worried about
> the layout of my home partition but wouldn't want to loose my documents,
> e-mail etc.  I thought of maybe even having the other distro as a dual
> (triple) boot. I was thinking about trying Fedora or PClinuxos.
> Errol
>
> --

You are perfectly fine having a common /home directory, but if you intend
to use a common *username* across different distros, you most likely will
have ownership problems as different distros may assign a different user
*id* number that correlates to the user name. This could render you unable
to login with that username in another OS. Also, sharing a common username
between distros will also mess with your desktop layout, wallpapers, etc.
depending on what themes, images and default settings each OS has
installed And some distros may also store local configs in a different
folder (.kde4 instead of .kde for example). I recommend using different
usernames. you can easily copy config files between the different OS's.

As for accessing documents, you should still be able to browse to them
fine, but a separate folder or partition for these file might be a good
idea so you can save them back.

Clay