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

[Pongo Pan]

On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 22:26 +0000, Colin Law wrote:

[ much snippage ]
> >
> > Preach it brother!  It can be an utter disaster to
> > share /home/<username>  between distros or even variants of the same
> > distro.  Much better to have as many small separate /home/<usernames> as
> > you have distros, *each in its own small partition* to contain the many
> > hidden .config files for each and a much larger common data area,
> > maybe /data, with distro agnostic stuff like documents, pictures, etc.
> > symlinked from each home. Ten GB is way more than enough for
> > each /home/<username>.
> 
> I don't see the point in having lots of little /home/username
> partitions, why not just keep those within the distro root partition
> and link to the common data partition as you suggest?

Could do it that way I suppose; I think having separate /homes makes it
simpler to upgrade each disto though.  Ubuntu and close relatives are
good at doing upgrades while saving "internal" homes; others are not.
 

-- 
pongo pan
Sun, 25 Nov 2012 14:42:20 -0800
Epicurus up 2 days, 2:36, 2 users, load average: 0.26, 0.30, 0.43
Linux 3.2.0-33-generic
Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, gnome-session 3.2.1, unity 5.16.0