Can I share my home between a Mint and Ubuntu?

[Bo Berglund]

I have a couple of oldish (10 years) HP laptops which I use to experiment with
and they currently both are Ubuntu 20.04.3 desktops.

Now after reading responses in thread:
"What tools to work with pkgs installed thru snap system"
where it was mentioned that Mint could be an interesting system for me.

So I would like to check if Linux Mint is more to my liking.

But I would like to share the home folder between them if possible.

I have done so on my server where I have Ubuntu 20.04.3 server and desktop
installed and both share their home through a separate partition.

But if I use different flavours of Linux between the installations, does it also
work then?

The idea is to first copy off the home tree to a new partition on a separate
disk.
Then delete all "heavy" stuff from the current home shrinking it down in size.
Then shrink the size of the single ubuntu partition to make space for a new
system partition for Mint and the shared home partition.
Finally copying in the home data to the new home partition and reconfigure the
existing Ubuntu to use that as the home.

Now there should be space to install Mint for testing and make it use the home
partition too.

Is this problematic when sharing between Ubuntu and Mint?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden