[mdlug] REcommendations for Partiton with shared home directory?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Feb 17, 2024, at 08:42, Carl T. Miller <carl at carltm.com> wrote:
> 
> Next create the swap space formatted as swap and the
> /home partition formatted as vfat.

I don’t think this will work out well.  The fat32 filesystem cannot handle a lot of features that are required in Linux home directories. It doesn’t support UNIX permissions/ownership or POSIX ACLs.  I believe it has a maximum file size of 4GB, a maximum partition size of 2TB. It will break certain things because it doesn’t support hard links and symlinks.  Most worrying, it is a very simple filesystem so it doesn’t have a journal like ext4 or XFS, making file corruption that much easier.  Lastly, I think fat32 isn’t case sensitive.  (So Filename.TxT is the same as filename.txt)

 If you want to share between Windows and Linux, having a shared vfat volume mounted on both is probably OK, you could just use symlinks for directories in ~/ like Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. You would have the volume mounted with forced ownership to your username.


One of the issues that will inevitably crop up with different distros with a shared /home will be making sure you use the same numeric UID for every OS.  Many distros have a default UID for their first user, and it’s not always the same.  File systems like ext4 store the numeric ID so you will need to use the same one on all installs.

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Jonathan Billings