Can I share my home between a Mint and Ubuntu?

[Robert Heller]

At Sun, 5 Dec 2021 18:56:14 +0000 "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 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 believe the OP wants to dual boot one (or both) laptops, Mint and Ubuntu
20.04.3, and wants to share /home for both boots on a specific laptop. In any
case /home will be a local file system.

> 
> > 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
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software        -- Custom Software Services
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Linux Administration Services
heller at deepsoft.com       -- Webhosting Services