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What's gained putting /home inside root partition?

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    What's gained putting /home inside root partition?

    I just installed Kubuntu 14.04 on my "new" laptop (Dell Latitude D520, Core2Duo 1.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD), and for the first time, used the "guided" install option that let me choose how much of the NTFS partition to shrink and use for Kubuntu -- I semi-randomly set at about 60 GB, which should leave plenty of room for the (presumed) seldom-used Windows 7 partition.

    I noted, however, that "guided" didn't create a separate /home partition, but rather included /home in the root partition. When I was learning Linux, I understood there were good reasons not to do it that way (a lesson driven home when I tried to preserve /home during a reinstall of antiX and wound up corrupting the partition and wasting several hours -- fortunately, no data lost that wasn't duplicated elsewhere). Most likely what I'll do in this case is shrink the Kubuntu partition and create a data partition, as I've done on my desktop machine (I don't expect to regularly use multiple Linux distros on the laptop, but there's room for a spare OS, so I'll probably also include symlinked data folders for things that aren't install-specific). What I'm wondering about, however, is why Canonical or the Kubuntu group would set up the installer this way -- just to simplify the transition for Windows users who are used to keeping their OS, installed programs, and user data all in one partition (asking for loss of data, IMO)? It'd be just as easy to include a choice in the installer with a short explanation that user data is best segregated from OS/programs, and that this separation is transparent in operation, and asking permission to set things up that way -- or to just automatically set up 20 GB for the OS (which seems plenty; my desktop Kubuntu, with lots of added stuff installed, uses just over 10 GB out of a 20 GB partition with the /home separated) unless there's a shortage of space.

    Sure, I could have used "manual", but partitioning the HDD myself would have cost me time at a moment when I had other stuff to do and wanted to get the install running -- and I know how to fix this without reinstalling by shrinking/creating partitions, copying the /home tree from root, and changing the fstab entry for /home, but a transitioner from Windows is very unlikely to have that level of knowledge (I certainly wouldn't have, two years ago when I was fleeing the sinking XP ship).

    #2
    Can't speak to why the devs didn't include this in the guided install. As you noted, unless you're very short on space there's no good reason to leave home within root (except for installs that you're just testing). Maybe they just didn't bother with the additional logic.

    I really no longer use any drive format other than btrfs (for installs, anyway) and Ubiquity always uses a separate subvolume for home. However, I've never done a guided install either...

    Please Read Me

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      #3
      Read the replies here -> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tition-658030/
      It's an old topic but the answers are still relevant.

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        #4
        To answer the thread subject directly, user configuration files are kept with the distro you've installed, and they can be tightly bound to the DE and version you install. The standard advice used to be to have a separate /home so that you could reinstall the OS, or have several installs sharing the one /home where you keep all your files. I used to do that but got burned with corrupted configurations and DE glitches, so now I leave /home on the root for each install, and have a separate /data partition with lots of links in the home directory to music, documents, pictures, videos, and the like on /data. If you don't mind blowing away your customizations in the event of DE glitches when you switch installs (mv .kde .kde.old and the like) a separate /home might be good, and might even save work when a new install picks up your config from an old one without any trouble.
        Regards, John Little

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