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I want to change from Ubuntu 11.04 to another distro and I have /home on a different partition than the other folders. I want to ask if it's possible to keep the same /home partion with another distro like OpenSuse or Mint?

The reason why I want to make the change is that Ubuntu is using a lot of RAM; even my WindowsXP with 512 RAM is working better than 1GB of RAM on Ubuntu. But maybe I'm the only one which thinks that an operating system should not respond to clicks after some seconds or to use all the RAM and Swap although only one program is running...

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    yes it's possible to keep you /home intact, you would only need to specify that to the installer, tell it not to format it and set the mount point /home to your old /home partition and you're done
    – Uri Herrera
    May 7, 2011 at 23:55

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Of cause it is generally possible. Just be sure not to format it during installation. But I advise you against doing this: later, many problems will surely arise.

Things to beware of:

  1. File access rights are stored not for user name, but for user id. Be sure your user has the same id on all OSes.
  2. Some apps will go crazy. Especially if they are of different versions or do some sort of file indexing.
  3. Some apps that use inotify are not ready for the fact they can miss some change in protected file.
  4. Dosens of other.

What you should do is to keep all your files on a separate partition, but not to mount it as /home. Let every system have it's own /home on the root partition. Mount your files partition somewhere like /home/storage, as I do, or mount it into /mnt and symlink folders into every /home you have.

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Copy home to Portable USB drive

  1. Format flash drive to ext4.

  2. As root use Grsync (install with sudo apt install grsync) to copy /home/{username} from the internal drive to the flash drive. Preserving owner, permissions and group by checking the relevant checkboxes works for me.

    Grsync window with suggested selections

  3. Copy or write down UUID of the new partition.

  4. Edit /etc/fstab on the internal drive to add the /home UUID:

    UUID={UUID from above} /home   ext4    defaults        0       0

It might be a good idea to use an encrypted home when traveling.

Thanks to @ubfan1 for the hint.

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