Hey folks!
I’m about to distro hop (again) to test Tumbleweed for a longer period of time 🦎 However, something i’ve not done before is to have my /home directory on a separate partition, should I? If I do it, should it be a different filesystem than the rest? (Been reading on OpenSuse TW forums and seen people mentioning that they use BTRFS for /home and XFS for the rest, or the other way around. Are there any benefits of using separate filesystems, or is this done to get the BTRFS backup for the /home dir?
What are the pros and cons of doing these changes to my system, lemmy know :)
Not really.
Even with lvm/sub volumes the benefit is that you could ostensibly keep one home directory between two different distributions you switch booting between. The better solution there would be to have a rsync backup and sync it after booting or shutting down or periodically because then you have a backup at least.
For distro hopping it’s not that great because who’s to say you’re getting the “good” experience with some random new distro when it overrides its defaults meant to be nicey-nice with some other stuff from ~/.gnome/gtk2/gtk3/desktop/widgets/clock/fonts/ttf/arial?
Just back your stuff up, rsync selectively from that backup and use the same filesystem for home as you do for /.
It’s the same thing as asking if you should put a lift in your homes attached garage. If you have to ask if it’s good idea and not just cool, then the answer is no.