Can I share my home between a Mint and Ubuntu?

[Peter Flynn]

On 05/12/2021 18:01, Bo Berglund wrote:
> 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.

If they're laptops, I'm not clear what this means. You can certainly
have the /home folder physically reside on one of them, and use an NFS
mount so the other one can use it as its own /home. But both laptops
have to be powered one, and they would need to be powered on in a known
sequence (provider first, then consumer). Can you explain a bit more
about how you'd like to share a disk if one of the laptops is not running.

> 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.

Right. But they're both on the same physical machine, right?

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

Yes, there shouldn't be any problem: nothing of the OS lives in /home,
only user account directories. However, if the different Linux flavours
mean some applications are installed in different versions between the
two machines, then their config or resource files probably can't be
shared, as there will be syntactic or resource differences which one
version will understand and the other not; these files typically live in
/home/<username>/.something, or in a window-manager subdirectory.

> 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.

You seem to be describing the sharing of the /home partition between
multiple-boot (or concurrent VM) instances of Linux /on the same
machine/. You said at the top you have two laptops. Did you want them to
share one /home between them, or for each one to host two OSs?

Peter