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Interesting, is this feasible in everyday life?

I do not use Linux on my desktop or notebook but I would like to do so in the near future. This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times? How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?

I imagine having ZFS snapshots of / would be useful for updates going forward.

discuss

viraptor|5 years ago

I've gone through 3 laptops now with a migrated home. That included ubuntu -> arch -> fedora migration too. It works pretty well. (with more issues between distros than between version upgrades)

> This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times?

Why would the user have privileges to save it outside of the home directory? :) Special cases like databases with storage in /var need to be handled separately.

e12e|5 years ago

> How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?

Nothing goes (should go) elsewhere by default.

If you're wiping the distro and re-installing - you probably don't want to keep /etc anyway.

Fwiw Ubuntu in place lts to lts release upgrade should be solid. But sometimes you want start with new, contemporary defaults, or a different disk layout.

BTW with zfs, you can have a separate home (or home/your_user) filesystem, and not worry about allocating fixed space (thus running out of free space on /, but with more available in /home and vice-versa).