[sf-lug] /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> 2. When you boot into another distro, some applications will be at a
> different version, and that can cause config file problems. For
> instance, if you run Firefox, or Gnome, or KDE, when you reboot into
> a different distro, Firefox will want to rewrite a bunch of config
> files to reflect the current version. So every time you reboot
> you'll be shifting back and forth between versions and probably
> eventually your config files will probably get messed up. 

I can confirm that this is a big problem with GNOME, particularly since
that DE makes the contents of its dotfiles and dotfile directories, by
policy, be forward-compatible (to later releases of GNOME), but often
fails backwards compatibility.  At Cadence Design Systems, we tried to
have homedirs mounted from autofs, and had many failures as users tried
to use their homedirs from various RHEL and SLED systems having
different versions of GNOME.  The failure symptom typically manifested
as the user session terminating immediately upon login until sysadmins
mv'd the user's dotfiles / dotfile directories.

The eventual solution was to cease using GNOME.