Can I share my home between a Mint and Ubuntu?

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 5 Dec 2021 at 19:03, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> 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.

Sure, if you wish.

> 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.

Folder, no. Partition, yes.

Keep the /home partition in a separate filesystem and you'll be fine.

If you use different usernames, they'll ignore one another: e.g.
Ubuntu used `bou` and Mint user `bom` then there will be no issues.

If you use the same username... well some weird stuff might happen.

Mint offers 3 desktops by default: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.

Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3. If you dual-boot GNOME Ubuntu and Mint
Cinnamon, some config files will be shared by both and weird stuff may
occur.

If you run, say, Ubuntu Mate and Mint Mate, weird stuff will definitely happen.

If you run unrelated desktops, e.g. GNOME and Xfce, then it should be all right.

Second thing to note:

This will only work on MBR and BIOS boot.

Mint has not renamed its UEFI boot loader; it is still called
"ubuntu". So as I understand it, you can't dual-boot Mint and Ubuntu
using UEFI, unless you do something weird and nonstandard like have 2
separate UEFI system partitions. I would not  recommend that.


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