Now this reminds me that I formated my windows partition a few mounts ago, so I don’t need the NTFS partition anymore. I guess I can now format it EXT4. I’m sure that in addition to freedom, it has other advantages.

I am one of those who swears by using two partitions: / and /home. Unlike mjjzf, though, I have never run into any problems with settings – in fact, it’s not losing all of my settings that pushes me to use this method more than anything else! When I want to upgrade my distribution (Ubuntu, as if you couldn’t tell by my username!), it’s as easy as wiping / and installing the new version. Of course, any installable programs’ icons will have disappeared from my taskbar (I like to keep shortcuts for gramps, liferea, tellico, glabels, terminator, etc up on my taskbar), but they immediately return once I have reinstalled the program from the repos.

The only things I have to do are redo config files stored in /etc (such as ddclient and something else which is escaping me right now), because I always forget to back them up before doing my upgrade.

I had no problem using my technique going from one version of Ubuntu to the next, as the core settings file/config for any program generally remains the same – or if there are major changes, as I remember there were when rtorrent included various new features such as DHT, backwards compatible. If something was to mess up, it would only require deleting .whatever in my home directory (whether that’s a config file or a whole hidden config subdirectory) and the next time I’d run the program, it would generate a generic version.

That said, I do agree that it’s often a mess if you distro hop!! I remember the day I went from Ubuntu to Fedora and used the same /home. Instead of “user” being the owner of all files, the permissions were really messed up… “1000″ was the owner of everything, if I remember correctly. As a person who has almost always used either Debian or Ubuntu, I didn’t realize that there would be a different way of handling permissions like that. I should mention that swapping between any version of Debian and Ubuntu (while sharing a /home directory) never seemed to generate any problems, though.

Anyway, I don’t want to go on and on endlessly. I really do find it interesting, though, that there are such different perspectives on things – although that seems to be the essence of linux. There’s no better OS for doing the same thing in a hundred different ways.

Thanks for taking this out of the realm of 140 characters… I had already asked about this on Ubuntu Forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1488099) as I was very curious to see what kind of discussion it would generate, and I really didn’t think it was possible due to the nature of identi.ca.

I think that your method of using symlinks is definitely the safest and easiest thing for distrohoppers.

Interesting blog, by the way! I’ve got you bookmarked and will look forward to coming back for more of your insights.