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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.