Ubuntu 12.04 changed itself to xubuntu and stopped working

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 4:31 AM, <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:21:37 +0200 Liam Proven wrote:
> > Partition your disk with /home in a separate partition, shared by all
> > of them, and then switching distros is as easy as rebooting.
>
> No, some data could become incompatible. In the past Evolution e.g.
> changed the format of the stored mails. This unlikely will happen
> again, but Evolution anyway still is a good example, since other data
> used by it, is often converted by updates and after that not backwards
> compatible. This could happen for any app, especially when different
> major versions are used and some known developers are already that
> ignorant, that they don't care about compatibility within dot releases.
> The risk that things break within dot releases especially is very high,
> when using desktop environments, so recommending a desktop environment
> and claiming that sharing /home is as easy as a reboot is reckless. I
> stopped using desktop environments and use window managers only, but
> anyway would be careful.
>
>
>
> Not only that, but the dotfiles where config stuff is stored can become
confused between versions.

I do something like this, but a bit more complicated.  I have all my
dotfiles in /home/<username>, but arrange
to run from /home/<username>/Desktop, which is actually a symlink to
/vhome/<username>, and that is what
is shared across distros and versions.  Other directories, such as
Documents, Downloads and so on are linked
to subdirectories of Desktop.  It took some setting up, but works well.

There are very few if any dotfiles in the Desktop directory.  The dotfiles
of each version and distro are in its own
root partition, and evolve separately.



-- 
Kevin O'Gorman
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