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

[Liam Proven]

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?
>
> 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.

I see a lot of FUD in this thread.

Yes, you can share one /home between as many distros as you want. I do
this routinely and have for >15 years. It's no problem. Ignore those
who recommend multiple /home partitions - that way lies confusion and
data loss - or who say it will cause problems. It won't.

Now, note well: inside /home there will be different home directories:

/home/alice
/home/bob
/home/charlie

etc.

If you have, say, 12.04 and 12.10 installed - as I do right now - and
you share the same HOME DIRECTORY between them (e.g. /home/alice) -
then when you go back to the older distro some apps might complain
about config files. But it works and you can do this just fine. I am
doing it right now. I am in 12.10 as I type but I also have and use
12.04 and both have a home of /home/lproven. It works fine. Ignore the
over-cautious who say it won't. It's perfectly OK, but occasionally,
you will find settings propagate back.

The way to avoid this is to use a different use account: the settings
in /home/bob will be completely ignored while you're logged in as
/home/charlie and vice versa.

So if you are paranoid you can have Ubuntu using /home/johnh1 and
Kubuntu using /home/johnh1 and Fedora using /home/johnh3 and any other
combinations you want. All are in the same /home *partition* but the
user account names are different so the home *directories* are
separate.

But yes, you can share a single one between versions safely - even
between distros *if and only if* they use different desktops, e.g.
Unity and KDE.

I have shared a home directory between Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 9 - both
the same version of GNOME 2, but with different themes - and it looks
as ugly as hell when you go from one to the other, because Mint is set
to a theme called "mint" or something and Ubuntu is set to "ambiance".
Mint doesn't have a theme called "ambiance" and Ubuntu doesn't have
one called "mint", so there are some errors and GNOME looks like a
mess until you pick a theme that actually exists, log out and log back
in again.

But this is the worst that happened.

Do it. It is not a problem, and "Pongo" is being overly cautious.



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