[mdlug] REcommendations for Partiton with shared home directory?

[Robert James Fulner]

Recently I bought my first new laptop in over a decade, one of the reasons
I fell in love with GNU/Linux was the ability to keep old hardware working
well past its "expiration date."

Anyway one of the things I like best about GNU/Linux is just the fun of
playing with different distros. To this day Debian is still my favorite,
but there are some I've never played with that I'd like to and I'd like to
be able to have all my documents, media, etc. available regularly from any
system I log into.

The few searches I have done on sharing home directories have mostly been
10+ years old so I'm not sure how much they say is still acurate for today.

They said the biggest concern with doing so is having the "hidden" config
files for different versions of the same program may cause issues. I'm
planning on using different DEs for each so if I use the defaults I would
think I woudl avoid that for the most part, though I'm not so certainly
about the lower level programs.

So here's what I have to work with and what I'm thinking for a partition.

500GB Hd with 32GB RAM.

Windows 11 (200 GB)
Swap (2GB)
HOME 275 GB
Debian Testing (XFCE) 5GB
PC Linux OS (Trinity) 5GB
Gentoo (X11 w/JWM) 5GB
Trisquel (GNOME) 5GB
Flavor of the week 5GB (be able to keep a partition I can easily wipe and
put whatever I feel like play with next.

How does that look? Is 5GB enough for a full feature distro these days? Any
recommendation of particular tool to do the partition and in which order to
do so. In the past I've tried using the wizards built into
Debian/Ubuntu/etc. and adding additional partitions later has seemed like a
pain. Any particular files systems recommended? Ideally, I'd like the
contents of my home directory to be able to be available via the Windows
Partition too, but I'm guessing that would mean I'd need NTFS, I'm not sure
how well the GNU/Linux distros would handle that, particularly for a 100%
free distro like Trisquel.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Jim Fulner
22100 Armada Ridge Rd.,
Armada, MI 48005-3204
(P) 248-971-0259
(M) 248-765-7458
(H) 586-473-7007

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