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Is it safe to have no `/home` partition?

rated 0 times [ 8] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 27643 / 2 Years ago, sun, july 31, 2022, 3:08:53

Most of the time I have 2, 3 or more Linuxes (usually ubuntu-family) side by side and I want to limit the number of my partitions.

So, I only use / partition for each of them and never had problems. A home folder is present anyway and I do not see why that should be on a separate partition.

But I see that many people recommend almost as a necessity to have a separate /home partition.

I would see that as an advantage if it could be used for different systems at the same time or something like that, which, while doable, is not what I need, I think, as the home folder contains settings which are very system-specific and also program-specific and program-version-specific.

As far as settings are concerned: using an old home folder/partition with a new system seems useless or even dangerous to me.

As far as data files (multimedia, documents etc) are concerned: as indicated in a comment under this answer - a completely separate partition (outside any system installation) and possibly symlinks is a better choice: isn't it?

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huovie

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago rstride · Accepted Answer

It is safe

Nothing wrong with using only one root partition per install. It's the default way to do it, linking another partition is an option.

As far as settings are concerned: using different distros might indeed cause some clashes. It can be very annoying but not really dangerous since the settings are for user level apps.

On the other hand, when doing an upgrade with the same distro or restoring a crashed system, keeping all your settings can save a lot of time, from your desktop background to your bookmarks, etc.

As far as data files: Symlinks are a good way to go about it, they just need to be setup. For someone using only one system, a separate home partition is in essence, similar to symlinks: your data is apart from your system.

Personally I use both.

The distro I use daily has a separate home partition, with the Videos, Music and Documents folders symlinked to a different drive. So I keep my home settings if I ever need to restore or upgrade and if I want to change my main distro entirely, I can compress all the hidden files and folders and restore the ones I want (firefox, etc) after the install.

I have another 3 distros installed, just for messing around. They have just one root partition each, and the same symlinks in their home folders. So I can easily access the data and not get setting problems.