installation doubt

[Liam Proven]

On 16 November 2011 16:32, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:04:40 +0000
> Alan Pope <alan at canonical.com> wrote:
>> He's not talking about that. He's talking about
>> the .evolution, .local, .config files etc that are in
>> your /home/lproven directory. Sharing those dot folders between
>> multiple releases / distros is unwise.
>
> exactly what i meant ... :)

OK then. I apologise!

I was writing in a bit of a rush - I should not have done so.

When I am multi-booting a computer between different distros, I share
a home filesystem but use different user accounts. So, for instance,
on my own laptop, I have Ubuntu 11.10 with user "lproven" and Linux
Mint Debian Edition with user "liam". This is perfectly safe.

My work laptop has Mint 9, Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10 and I think something
else as well. All use different usernames.

On the other hand, you can safely share a single home directory
between different installs of the same (or similar) distros. My
desktop has 2 installs of Ubuntu 11.10 - my original one, which failed
the day after I upgraded, and a new, troubleshooting install in a
different partition. Both share /home/lproven with no problems. The
clean install now runs GNOME Shell and the original install Unity -
these do not clash at all.

I *have* had problems sharing between (say) Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 9
(which is based on Ubuntu 10.04). Ubuntu doesn't have Mint's themes
installed, so when installed Mint (after Ubuntu) and logged in, it was
fine - it picked up my existing Ubuntu desktop, but with its own
theme. When I logged back into Ubuntu, the theme was scrambled because
it referred to a Mint theme that wasn't installed. This is a nuisance.

If you (e.g.) run KDE on one OS and GNOME on the other, say, it works
fine - they don't trample on one another's settings. You sometimes get
the odd stray desktop icon from one OS that does nothing on the other,
but mostly, it's fine.

But for this reason, now, I use separate user accounts. That causes no
problems at all.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508