Is it a bad idea to keep the home partition

[Fargo]

I just did a fresh install of Maui Linux. During the install I was given the option to keep my /home partition. Wanting to keep the partition for my home partition I clicked the box It turns out Maui did a really nice job of backing up all my dot files and saved all my other files in the partition.

My question is: Is this going to cause configuration issues down the road? I like Maui and want to give it every chance to shine and impress me, I don't want to do anything that might cause issues. In which case I would abandon Maui. So I have concerns that if I keep my home partition, I could end up with a mix of Maui and my old OS (SolydK)

So are there any issues with keeping the /home partition. I ask because I did this once before when I switched from Mepis to SolydK. (Both Debian Stable based) However, during that change over, when I saved the home partition, I ended up with Mepis configuration files messing up my fresh install. So I have concerns about saving the home partition.

So please let me know if I am safe to keep my /home partition. If this is a safe way to change to Maui it makes updates and things very easy.

[kdemeoz]

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.

[leszek]

In general we recommend not to reuse the old /home with the old configurations as they might conflict with what we ship in Maui.
What we recommend is, if you want to reuse the home partition to create a user with a different name (so it does not use the /home/oldusername folder directly but rather a new folder) and then copy/move the Images, Video and Music files over that you need. If it comes to applications (not the desktop) mostly you can also copy/move the firefox/thunderbird profile or other application configuration files and try them out if they work correctly.

[Fargo]

Thanks guys. I really hesitated to reuse the /home folder. Because I too had issues doing that in the past. But after I saw that Maui put all .dot files (Or hidden files) into a 'dotfiles backup' folder, I figured I would be OK. So far everything seems to work great. As far as I can tell, all of the config files appear to be new files from the Maui install. Nothing appears to match the files in the 'dotfiles backup' folder.

I don't know if the 'dotfiles backup' folder is something new with the Calamares installer or something that Ubuntu has always done. I've never seen it before, but it looks like a fantastic way to upgrade. However, since I use this machine for business and I really can't afford to be chasing down odd bugs that are caused by leftover KDE4 packages I will reformat both /root and /home.

Thanks for the info guys. If you have never noticed the 'dotfiles backup' folder that I am talking about please do a maui install on top of something else and check it out. I'd really like more info on how this folder is created. Right now it looks like a perfect solution for updating a system. But I can't take that chance until I know more.

[kdemeoz]

"the 'dotfiles backup' folder"

That sounds interesting... i keenly await the Mods' advice on it.