[erlkonig]

Most of both this article and the discussion is covering the simple case of home on a local hard drive, rather than the more interesting real-world situations with network-mounted home directories and multiple different HW/OS architectures you'd want to be able to have handled transparently. Which is fine.

For more... interesting network scenarios, it can be helpful to construct some variable, say, $HOSTABI, that includes tokens for both hardware and OS.

$ echo $HOSTABI x86_64-ubu-2204

Which can then be used inside architecture-influenced variables like ARCH, LIBRARY_PATH / LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, as well as inside the user's own installation system (makefiles, etc) used for anything the user compiled. Great for just installing some new hw/sw combo, mount home, cd into "~/src" or equivalent and run "make install", and just get all your own code recompiled and installed for your new architecture.

This is a microcosm of what sysadmins on heterogeneous networks do, mostly for different hardware architectures, although this was a much more common situation in earlier years than more recently where Linux has taken over even more of the corporate/research world. I've found it pretty useful even at home, where I'm using my one home directory across my systems' different installations of Linux with different library requirements (although I should probably sell that SGI Onyx/RE - IRIX not Linux - that Wing Commander III was rendered on).

My home directory is usually populated almost exclusively with dotfiles and some threescore subdirs with 3ish-letter names like doc/ etc/ fun/ (I'm a gamer) git/ iso/ job/<site>/<recursehere> lib/ man/ pub/ (packages of my own programs) sbin/ src/ steam/ (yep) tmp/ var/ (notes, logs, etc) vr/ ... and so on.

It seems to work out alright. Contains about half a million subdirs and 4.2 million files. ;-)