The root partition / and the home partition /home are different.
There's a /home/etc/ folder with a very small set of configuration files I want to save, everything else is nuked on reinstall.
When I do a reinstall, the root partition is formatted, the /home partition is not.
This allows me to test different distros and not be tied to any particular distro or any particular backup tool, if I test a distro and I don't like it, then it is very easy to change it.
The implication here is that your home directory can actually work across distros? How in the world do you do that? Surely you have to encounter errors sometimes when cached data or configs point to nonexistent paths, or other incompatibilities come up?
Typically ~ contains user specific config files for applications, which are (usually) programmed to be distro agnostic. If you're installing the same applications across distros, I don't see why this wouldn't work without too much effort. After all, most distros are differentiated by just two things:
- their package management tooling
- their filesystem layout (eg where do libraries etc go)
It is a backup directory owned by root. The reason is that it sits in the partition that is preserved, and it is outside my user folder, because it is better organized that way.
The root partition / and the home partition /home are different.
There's a /home/etc/ folder with a very small set of configuration files I want to save, everything else is nuked on reinstall.
When I do a reinstall, the root partition is formatted, the /home partition is not.
This allows me to test different distros and not be tied to any particular distro or any particular backup tool, if I test a distro and I don't like it, then it is very easy to change it.