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

[Ken Shaffer]

As was pointed out, trying to share a uers's actual home directory
across distributions is problematic, so what Tom and I did was to
mount the extra partition as /usr/local/data, and just have a symlink
from Tom's home directory to there.  If you really want, you can other
links for Documents, Downloads, etc.  Having a system independent
place for your stuff give you great flexiblity in changing/testing
systems, letting each system have its own home location for storing
its dot files (.config, .cache, .local, .gnome, etc.).

Ken

On 3/5/18, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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