Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install

[Evan Huus]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Bruno Girin <brunogirin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 December 2010 10:55, Phillip Susi <psusi at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>> This is what manual partitioning is for.  Also /home can not be on NTFS
>> since it does not support ownership and permissions.
>
> Well, yes and no: manual partitioning is for advanced users who know
> what they are doing. The fact that it's the only way you can install
> Ubuntu with a separate /home partition isn't easy for the average
> user, who doesn't know what the benefits of a separate /home are in
> the first place.

This is an important point. The 'average' user isn't going to be able to take
advantage of a separate home partition, even if the installer does it
automatically for them. Reinstalling while preserving user data is
already possible with a single / partition, and more complicated recovery
operations (such as the one which started this thread) are not going to
occur to someone who doesn't know enough to manually partition in the
first place.

Admittedly, the installer could make it easier for power-users to divide up
their partitions without specifying every detail manually, but I don't think it
would provide any functional benefit, just usability benefit.

Evan