Two distributions and one data partition...

[tenfoot]

At present I run two distributions (LMDE201204 and SolusOS RC3) on one HDD. Obviously there are two /Home partitions and when swapping from one to the other, I copy to a pen drive the hidden configuration files, e.g. .mozilla, .gnote, etc..

My HDD is only 200GB and I am thinking of repartitioning it:

20GB for LMDE
20GB for Solus OS
4GB Swap
156GB (the balance) as a Data partition

My Questions are:

(a) Would the OS partitions be large enough under normal circumstances, or should I increase them to, say, 30GB each?

(b) I have 4GB RAM. Am I going overboard with the swap size?

(c) How do I access the hidden files, e.g. .mozilla, (I do use XMarks) .gnote? Can I copy them to the Data partition, or is it more complicated than that?

(d) Would ext4 be suitable for the Data partition or should I use ntfs? I run Wine successfully for a couple of Windows only genealogy programs, and this is my only need for Windows.

As you will realise, the purpose of this exercise is to enable me to access my config files without having to copy to and from a pen drive every time I decide to boot into the "other" distribution,.

[CptMidnight]

Two distros can't share the same /home partition because application version numbering will differ between the two. You'd run into "unmet dependency" issues with apt-get very quickly.

Is there a reason why you can't use a portable version of Mozilla on a USB stick, or use a cloud-based scratchpad like Google Docs?