5th May 2017, 7:00
Hello
I'm only a proletarian user, not a Dev or Mod, & i only have ~4 years experience using Linux [after decades of Windows], so i am very far away from being any kind of expert. That said, fwiw, here are my remarks fyi:
As i researched more, & learned more over these 4 years, i realised there seemed to be these competing philosophies:
1. No separate /home, no separate /data partition
2. Separate /home, no separate /data partition
3. No separate /home, separate /data partition
4. Separate /home, separate /data partition
I began my Linux life with #1 [per Installer defaults], changed to #2 for a couple of years, & dabbled with #3 & #4 briefly when experimenting with multi-Linux boots. Nowadays both my Lappy & Tower are once again single-boot [Maui], & my practice is back to #2.
For better or worse, my attitude now is this:
a. If some catastrophe occurred [including by my own stupidity] that i irretrievably broke my OS, i would reinstall it via the usual root reformat, but would reuse my /home specifically to retain all my customisations.
b. If any weird misbehaviours persisted, i would again reinstall, but this time would also purge prior configs by reformatting /home as well as of course root.
c. If changing distros [eg, Mint 17.3 KDE4 to Maui*], or doing a major upgrade of the same distro via fresh install [as per Maui 2.1 to Maui 17.03], i would reformat both root & /home to ensure no possibility of old incompatible config files creating unpleasant problems in the new OS.
* I learned this the hard way, & if you're masochistic enough, you can find various agonised posts of mine in these fora as i tried to deal with bad Maui issues [probably] caused by my initial decision not to reformat my [Mint] /home during the Maui installation [a multitude of problems & weirdness beset my initial Maui 1 experience that other users were not experiencing].
Note that, were it not for two specific "mandatory requirements" of mine, i would actually prefer to use #3, with /home used ONLY for any config or settings files specifically for the OS [only], & /data for [obviously] all my documents but also all the .config files for my installed pgms [= not only all their personalised settings, but in the case of pgms like Thunderbird also all their actual data (here, emails & calendar etc)]. Those two issues, which from experience made it impractical for me to stay with #3, are:
(i) I always encrypt [eCryptFS] my /home partition during the install process. Unfortunately no Installer that i've used so far can handle me nominating another partition to encrypt. This forces me, post-installation, to manually secure the /data partition, eg, via VeraCrypt, or eCryptFS. I've used both, they both work fine in the technical sense, but pragmatically it does not take long to tire of having to manually mount & decrypt them each boot.
(ii) Having discovered FireJail last year, i run all my internet-facing pgms in it. This works well when [as it expects & is designed for] all user-data resides in /home, but becomes [for me] very hard to manage when data is elsewhere. Sometimes i had to decide on a tradeoff for some pgms; run in FJ or store their data & settings in /data... but not both.
As a final remark, note that at least some of the agonising over this decision is negated if one chooses to use the excellent Aptik pgm.
I'm only a proletarian user, not a Dev or Mod, & i only have ~4 years experience using Linux [after decades of Windows], so i am very far away from being any kind of expert. That said, fwiw, here are my remarks fyi:
As i researched more, & learned more over these 4 years, i realised there seemed to be these competing philosophies:
1. No separate /home, no separate /data partition
2. Separate /home, no separate /data partition
3. No separate /home, separate /data partition
4. Separate /home, separate /data partition
I began my Linux life with #1 [per Installer defaults], changed to #2 for a couple of years, & dabbled with #3 & #4 briefly when experimenting with multi-Linux boots. Nowadays both my Lappy & Tower are once again single-boot [Maui], & my practice is back to #2.
For better or worse, my attitude now is this:
a. If some catastrophe occurred [including by my own stupidity] that i irretrievably broke my OS, i would reinstall it via the usual root reformat, but would reuse my /home specifically to retain all my customisations.
b. If any weird misbehaviours persisted, i would again reinstall, but this time would also purge prior configs by reformatting /home as well as of course root.
c. If changing distros [eg, Mint 17.3 KDE4 to Maui*], or doing a major upgrade of the same distro via fresh install [as per Maui 2.1 to Maui 17.03], i would reformat both root & /home to ensure no possibility of old incompatible config files creating unpleasant problems in the new OS.
* I learned this the hard way, & if you're masochistic enough, you can find various agonised posts of mine in these fora as i tried to deal with bad Maui issues [probably] caused by my initial decision not to reformat my [Mint] /home during the Maui installation [a multitude of problems & weirdness beset my initial Maui 1 experience that other users were not experiencing].
Note that, were it not for two specific "mandatory requirements" of mine, i would actually prefer to use #3, with /home used ONLY for any config or settings files specifically for the OS [only], & /data for [obviously] all my documents but also all the .config files for my installed pgms [= not only all their personalised settings, but in the case of pgms like Thunderbird also all their actual data (here, emails & calendar etc)]. Those two issues, which from experience made it impractical for me to stay with #3, are:
(i) I always encrypt [eCryptFS] my /home partition during the install process. Unfortunately no Installer that i've used so far can handle me nominating another partition to encrypt. This forces me, post-installation, to manually secure the /data partition, eg, via VeraCrypt, or eCryptFS. I've used both, they both work fine in the technical sense, but pragmatically it does not take long to tire of having to manually mount & decrypt them each boot.
(ii) Having discovered FireJail last year, i run all my internet-facing pgms in it. This works well when [as it expects & is designed for] all user-data resides in /home, but becomes [for me] very hard to manage when data is elsewhere. Sometimes i had to decide on a tradeoff for some pgms; run in FJ or store their data & settings in /data... but not both.
As a final remark, note that at least some of the agonising over this decision is negated if one chooses to use the excellent Aptik pgm.