Have a separate home partition and just keep using it across distributions?
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Additionally, ensure that flatpaks are installed within that home partition. Some distros (like Fedora) default to installing flatpaks system-wide (and thus flatpaks end up being installed in /var instead). So, after ensuring that your home folder is correctly found within the home partition, just install flatpaks with the flatpak install --user *package-name* command.
I'm not experienced enough with linux to understand if this is a question or a statement on what I can do. In either case, I don't know how to interpret what this means.
They are confirming that, yes, it is an option to have a partition dedicated to just the user’s (your) home environment and folders
and
asking if that is an option that appeals to you or you have already considered.
It is what I prefer, but there are people who have good reason to not like that. It’s worth trying out imo, and later if you find that it doesn’t suit you, that’s okay, you’ll just need to find another solution
Thank you, that makes sense.
What reasons would people not like doing that?
I personally feel like separation of user data and OS data is easier for me to manage.
I find it annoying to worry about multiple partition sizes. Having to make sure your root and home partition are sized correctly is one more thing to think about.
That makes sense. I guess for my case it's fine since I have more storage than I can use. Additionally, I keep my most important data on multiple offline storages and even that is quite minimal.
When installing Linux, you first have to partition your hard drive.
You can create a seperate partition for your /home folder in addition to the one you create for the rest of the system.
Then when you install a different distro, you can tell the installer to use your /home partition without changing or formatting it. After installation, you will have the new Linux system and the /home folder from your old one. That way, all user settings and flatpak settings will be the same as before reinstalling.
But if you're a new Linux user, I don't know how helpful this is. It's easier to just copy everything in /home to an external drive, then copy it back after you reinstalled, for the same effect.
That first bit makes sense, I should be able to figure that out I think.
The reason I want to avoid using an external drive is because it takes a minimum an hour to transfer 4 games worth of data currently. That time is an inhibiting factor for me. I'd like to minimize downtime.
Also I'd like to test gaming oriented distributions with newer kernels compared to what Linux Mint ships with.
I have my steam library on a second drive but I am not using the flatpak of steam.
I think it's possible to have the steam flatpak use a second partition, if you use flatseal to allow the steam flatpak full access.