Arch Linux

drudox

Member

Registered: 2017-10-01

Posts: 126

home in common from 2 distribution

As from the title I would know if is possible use a home partition in common from arch (the distro that i usually using) and debian (distro that i need for the old package) there is some problem ?

simona70

Banned

Registered: 2017-01-08

Posts: 41

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

debian and arch can have different packages revision, config are in home, so i think this could be a problem. I used the same home only to convert my personal distribution from fedora to arch.

drudox

Member

Registered: 2017-10-01

Posts: 126

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

and if I use 2 different users ?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

Having the same home partition will cause no problem at all, and I'd suggest that it is the best way to go.  Whether you can use the same home folder for a user on both systems is an option question - it's possible, but generally ill-advised due to the above-mentioned conflcting configs.

If you are like me and prefer to have the same username on most systems, you can actually have the same user name, just have a different home directory for one of them.  Admittedly, some software makes the unfortunate assumption that a user's home folder is /home/$USER, so there may be some glitches.

But using a differen username and/or home directory for each system would pose no issue at all.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

debian (distro that i need for the old package)

What old package do you need from Debian?

hilltownboy

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2013-08-15

Posts: 100

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

With arch and debian both on the same laptop but keeping their separate home directories, I use a common directory (which I call "data") for all the usual home directories such as Dcouments, Pictures, etc.  Each home directory has symlinks to those "data"/directories.  Thus the system alsways has its user data available to either OS, and the data is easy to keep backed up regularly.

sincomil

Member

Registered: 2018-02-13

Posts: 106

Re: home in common from 2 distribution

If you trying to migrate from one distribution to another you can go the way I do that(in case you if you want to keep you users home directory the same):
1. My home partition is btrfs formatted, so I make a snapshot(subvolume) of my home partition on my current distribution.
2. Mount that snapshot as /home in my new distribution that I want to migrate to.
3. Test that everything working ok/ or tune thing that not ok
4. Now at this point you have 2 subvolumes that working  as /home for each of you distributions, since btrfs uses CoW only modified files will consume additional space on your disk