How best to set up a separate /home partition, and pros/cons

[Colin Law]

On 25 November 2012 19:20, John D. Herron <paradox.herron at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> Hi, all.
>
> Currently running Ubuntu Natty pre-installed on a stand-alone machine
> (Dual-core AMD Athlon 255, 4 GB RAM, 1TB HDD).
>
> Since I have a lot of unused disk space I'd like to add and try out some
> other distros (Linux Mint 13, Zorin OS, ...).
>
> In order to keep things 'streamlined' (i.e. to avoid unnecessary
> duplications) I'm looking into setting up a separate /home partition to
> serve the future distros as well.
>
> Is this a reasonable idea? If so, how should I best go about it?

I think it is not a good idea to try and share a home folder between
different versions of ubuntu never mind between different distros.
You will have different versions of applications on the two systems
trying to use the same configuration and data files.  Moving from a
earlier version to a later should not be a problem, but if you try to
go back to the earlier one you may well have problems.  Trying to do
the same with different distributions may be even worse as they may
have conflicting requirements in files in the home directory.

Colin

>
> By the way: i'm aware that Natty is no longer supported and intend to
> upgrade to (or new-install) the latest LTS version.
>
> Thanks for your help and/or comments.
> john
>
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