[clug] Upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 problems

Chris Smart clug at christophersmart.com
Fri May 6 02:17:10 UTC 2016


On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:32:12PM +1000, Gary Woodman wrote:
>On 04/05/16 21:24, Chris Smart wrote:
>
>>But a separate /home is just so much easier.
>
>Easier than...? In a distant past I had a separate /home filesystem, 
>but a couple of times I was tripped up with incompatible dotfiles.

Yep, that can happen when dual-booting multiple Linux distros and they
use different major versions of the same desktop.

>
>It really depends on your use case.

Yeah, that's true.

>I still distro-hop a bit, and 
>usually have two or three alternate root partitions on the primary 
>drive, with a /home on each. It's no big deal to copy any relevant 
>stuff to a new /home, because I still have the old /home, and because 
>the balance of the drive has my personal stuff, in a separate 
>filesystem, mounted on /data.
>

As you mention, having /home on each distro's / partition now splits your
files out onto several partitions, needing to juggle what you have where
and backing it up if you want to try out something new and shiny.

No big deal perhaps, but you get all that for free with a separate /home
partition.

Separate /data helps, you just don't have things like your browser or
any of your desktop configuration by default.

But then if you're going to have /data it might as well just be a /home
partition and use different usernames for each distro you install, with
shared data under /home/data.

Or even with the same username, but still a different home dir.

In each distro you create your user with the same name and UID/GID but
specify a different home dir and then symlink in anything you want from
your main home dir.

E.g.:
/home/chris
	.mozilla
	.config/chromium
	Documents
	Downloads
	Music
	...
/home/chris-arch
	.mozilla -> /home/chris/.mozilla
	Documents -> /home/chris/Documents
	...
/home/chris-ubuntu
	.config/chromium -> /home/chris/.config/chromium
	Downloads -> /home/chris/Downloads
	...

Reinstall that distro and just create the same user details and
everything is magically there, settings, data and all. No juggling
required!

Now you can just backup /home and you can always get back everything
nicely.

But yeah, horses for courses.

-c



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