How to clean up shared home directory?

[Rehdon]

Hi guys,
being a faithful LM Cinnamon user I have at least a couple of LM installations on my main desktop. At the moment I have LM 18.3 which I consider the main working (and stable) OS, LM 19.2 which I've played with in the past (strangely not so stable, plus I miss the middle mouse button menu for copying/moving/linking files...) and an Ubuntu 19.10 partition (to see how the post-Unity Ubuntu is shaping up).

I'm going to overwrite the 19.2 partition with the latest 19.3 LM Cinnamon, which is working fine on my laptop (except for the promised hi-dpi fine tuning, but that's another story), but since I'm one of the early Cinnamon users my /home has lots of configuration stuff dating back to the early days, and I wonder if some of the instability problems I had are somewhat related to this.

So, here's the question: what's the best way to clean up my /home so that it works fine with LM Cinnamon 18.3 and 19.3? Or should I only try to have the 19.* series as main OS? I don't think there are system tools doing just that, are there?

Thank you in advance,

R

[jglen490]

Since /home contains user config files for installed software as well as user data files, sharing the same /home among different OSes can result in software problems, especially if there are different versions of the same software in use among the multiple OSes.

One solution (and there are undoubtedly others) is to have different users within /home that correspond to each different OS. Then, where there are user files (docs, spreadsheets, pics, videos, etc) shared among those users, have a separate directory with nothing but those common user files (i.e., /mnt/docs). That way the config files will be in each user directory and common user files will be in one common directory. Even that can be "iffy" when widely different versions of software are used in each OS.

[JoeFootball]

... I wonder if some of the instability problems I had are somewhat related to this.

Yes, I would suspect that as well.

... what's the best way to clean up my /home so that it works fine with LM Cinnamon 18.3 and 19.3?

I would have LM 18.3 and LM 19.3 have their own /home directories for their own settings, and share whatever else you'd like to be shared accomplished via a different manner.

I too have multiple LM installations, but each one has its own /home directory, and they all share the same /data partition. e.g., all my music, pictures, videos, etc., are leveraged by each OS using the same /data, but each has its own independent /home for its settings, etc.

EDIT: Kind acknowledgement given to jglen490 for beating me to the Submit button with essentially the same answer.

Joe

[jglen490]

Um, I think that's what I said

[JoeFootball]

Um, I think that's what I said

Indeed.

Joe

[Rehdon]

Thank you both jglen490 and JoeFootball

I think I'll try it this way:

- have a separate /home for each distro (LM 18.3 and 19.3, possibly Ubuntu and/or other I want to test)
- have the minimum necessary in each /home
- keep everything else on another partition
- link from the latter to each /home

It will take some time to set it up, but I see no other way.

Thanks,

R