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I need advice... I have hardware, a Huawei D15 laptop. 512GB SSD. I tripled booted it with Windows 11, Ubuntu 22.04 (the correct way this time), and Linux Mint Debian Edition.

The Win11 Partition has 100GB plus another 32GB data disk.
Ubuntu and LMDE each got 50GB partitions,and the remaining ~100GB is /home partition.

My first thought was since they are both debian based distros, having the linux OSs share a home folder should be fine...

Did some reading and sure enough it -should- work with no problem as long as the user has the same UID/GID in both OS... (I confirmed, they are the same). So I went ahead set-up a shared home folder...

Question(s):
I am wondering is someone else has similar setup?

Am I setting up myself up for "settings conflict headaches" between the different OS, while I am being productive and under deadlines?

Or is better to just change my config now to separate home folders for each OS's settings and just symlink my actual file folders for long-term piece of mind, but more complex back up routine?

nightwatch
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  • All the OS you mention can access an NTFS formatted partition. BUT they do not all use the same permissions on the files so keep that in mind. – David Apr 08 '23 at 16:28
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    Your last sentence nails it, I'd recommend to do so to avoid version conflicts or other fancy surprises. – mook765 Apr 08 '23 at 16:32

2 Answers2

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Don't share a /home, share the personal files in /home/$USER/. The reason not to do that is so that you keep all the config files out of it. You can set up synch for browsers if you need to share bookmarks.

Create a mount point on a partition (not on the system disk). If you also want to use Windows with it use a partition formatted as NTFS otherwise use EXT4. Move the personal directories to a partition and share that for all your systems.

To link your /home/$USER/ to that partition see ~/config/users-dirs.dirs.

If you need to use different user IDs you can set the partition up with a group and add users on all system to the same group ID.

This way a re-install means to format your / and mount (and not format) your partition with the same filesystem.

I have been using this for well over a decade:

rinzwind@schijfwereld:/$ ls -ltr
total 80
drwxrwxrwx  14 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 mrt 19 17:26 discworld
...
rinzwind@schijfwereld:/$ ls -ltr discworld/
total 56
drwxr-xr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 okt  3  2021 Public
drwx------ 2 root     root     16384 okt  3  2021 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 okt  3  2021 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 9 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 sep 22  2022 Videos
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 okt  5  2022 scripts
drwxr-xr-x 4 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 dec 24 22:19 Music
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 mrt 19 17:26 vpn
drwxr-xr-x 6 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr  5 14:34 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 3 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr  8 14:32 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 4 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr  8 14:58 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 7 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr  8 18:28 Desktop

and users-dirs.dirs contains:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="/discworld/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/discworld/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="/discworld/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="/discworld/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/discworld/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/discworld/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="/discworld/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/discworld/Videos"
Rinzwind
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  • I do something similar, but use Links. I keep /home inside / as without data /home is tiny. And then have one shared data partition with multiple Ubuntu installs. Back when using XP, I had two data partitions, one NTFS for some data in both Ubuntu & XP. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013677/storing-data-on-second-hdd-mounting – oldfred Apr 08 '23 at 21:05
  • I noticed that ssome apps don't like symlinks so went for this option. – Rinzwind Apr 09 '23 at 04:16
  • @Rinzwind I am trying to implement this now, but I have a weird problem. In both LMDE and Ubuntu the users-dirs directives seem to be ignored. ls ltr shows the permissions are correct for my user. I also have a monunt point at /something added to my fstab . users-dirs has XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="/something/Desktop" Also, /something/Desktop correctly appears as a system folder.. so I am confused.. what am I missiing? – nightwatch Apr 10 '23 at 06:02
  • what I mean by ignored... is that nautilus still reads /home/$USER/desktop rather than /something/Desktop – nightwatch Apr 10 '23 at 06:08
  • I figured it out.. unless I have done something wrong, in LMDE I need to edit the nautilus bookmarks. In Ubuntu the bookmarks were automatically updated after a reboot execept Public, Temple and Desktop, so I manually added bookmarks for them. @Rinzwind thanks for the help... perhaps add this last step to your answer? – nightwatch Apr 10 '23 at 06:33
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The computer labs at my uni (college) did exactly this. Not only was the home directory shared among different distros but completely different OSes: SunOS, Solaris, HPUX,Digital Unix, Linux (Red Hat) and Windows NT.

The home directory (or User directory on Windows) are mounted from a large cluster of shared storage upon login and unmounted when you logout.

It worked fine. Config files that the different OSes can share are shared (and this includes the local email directory) and those that aren't used on a particular OS are ignored.

slebetman
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