On 11/27/2012 12:34 PM, Randy Westlund wrote: > Hi, > > I'm a new gentoo user (coming from ubuntu). I've been proving to > myself that I can do everything I need with gentoo on a secondary > laptop, and after a few weeks, I think I've got it (svn repos, AVR > cross compiler, multiple screens, etc). I much prefer gentoo to > ubuntu, and would like to put it on my primary laptop. But I think I > should leave an ubuntu installation on there just in case. I'd like > to have gentoo, ubunu, and win7 alongside each other. > > How feasible would it be to have gentoo and ubuntu share a /home > partition? I've never had a reason to have multiple linux > installations on a single machine before, but I can't think of a > reason why this wouldn't work. .bashrc might need a few more lines of > code. .screenrc and .exrc would be fine. My ssh keys can be shared. > What would happen to .mozilla if ubuntu and gentoo are running > different versions of firefox? What other issues might I run into? > > Alternatively, is there a way to keep gentoo's and ubuntu's hidden > files separate and link or map them to ~ at boot?
You might have problems when Gentoo upgrades a package and Ubuntu falls behind. For a made-up example, suppose Gentoo bumps XFCE to 4.12 and Ubuntu is still at 4.10. XFCE will upgrade all of its config files in ~/.config, and the next time you boot to Ubuntu, things will probably crash. I've had the same problem from time to time on a smaller scale with LyX, GTK, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. You can work around it fairly easily, though. Just mount all of your version-independent stuff separately, under ~/Documents or whatever. Or never go back to Ubuntu =)
