Can you reuse your home directory while distro hopping?
I want to install additional Linux distributions on my computer, so I can try some new ones and see if they're better than my current ("old") one.
I've been using my current distro for a while. I've figured out most things. Generally most everything works and if not I have a way of fixing it. When I switch to a new distro, there will be some initial acclimatization period when I haven't yet learned it well, and am unable to do some of my usual tasks with it. A contrived example: I don't want to explain to people that currently I can't print anything because I haven't figured out how to set up CUPS on the new distro yet. When that happens, I would want to just quickly boot into the old distro, print what I need, and figure out CUPS on the new one in due time.
When dual booting 2 distros, do I have to keep a whole parallel /home for each one? With all my configuration, user data, etc. duplicated for each distro? Or can I have them simply share /home?
My instinct is that it wouldn't work, because the user permissions wouldn't match up between the two distros. Also, I've heard that sometimes this breaks program in some mythical way, because a program in the new distro encounters some unexpected stuff left over by the old one, I guess...
Is there some easy way to make this work nicely?
Disk space is not an issue here, my /home is small, I have spare drives. Also, a lot of my config is automated, and I already synchronize it across multiple computers. So it's not the end of the world to have two homes, but of course if I could share one it would save me a few steps.
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Permission wise you generally shouldn't have problems. Ownership in Linux/Unix uses numerical IDs, and on every major distribution the UIDs for regular users start at 1000, meaning the first user that is created during installation uses the 1000. Having a corresponding group with the same name is also pretty common. I'm pretty sure there are some exotic distributions out there which don't adhere to these practices, but I'd expect them to be rare.
sometimes this breaks program in some mythical way, because a program in the new distro encounters some unexpected stuff left over by the old one
This really could pose problems. Quite often the version numbers of the same program will vary from distribution to distribution, so with applications, services and libraries which are used by a lot of distributions (dbus, GTK, QT, pulseaudio and basically every desktop environment, to name a few) will have a high chance of problems when versions differ, especially major versions where there are chances that the format of the configuration files changes, or configuration options are added which are unknown to older versions.
One solution I can think of is to place the "main directories" (Desktop, Documents, Videos, Pictures etc.) in a different place and just symlink them to the home directory for each distribution.
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