Ubuntu 12.04 changed itself to xubuntu and stopped working

[Petter Adsen]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 13:31:33 +0200
silver.bullet at zoho.com wrote:

> On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:21:37 +0200 Liam Proven wrote:
> > Partition your disk with /home in a separate partition, shared by all
> > of them, and then switching distros is as easy as rebooting.
> 
> No, some data could become incompatible. In the past Evolution e.g.
> changed the format of the stored mails. This unlikely will happen
> again, but Evolution anyway still is a good example, since other data
> used by it, is often converted by updates and after that not backwards
> compatible. This could happen for any app, especially when different
> major versions are used and some known developers are already that
> ignorant, that they don't care about compatibility within dot releases.
> The risk that things break within dot releases especially is very high,
> when using desktop environments, so recommending a desktop environment
> and claiming that sharing /home is as easy as a reboot is reckless. I
> stopped using desktop environments and use window managers only, but
> anyway would be careful.

Absolutely, and in this case, using various distros and versions
thereof, it could prove quite troublesome. A better way to do it would
be to set up a shared partition/LV with data you do want to share in
all installations, and set up symlinks pointing there from /home.

That would also leave you with the option of configuring the
environment in each installation appropriately, without them affecting
each other. Trying to use the same dotfiles etc in both Debian 6 and
Ubuntu 14.04 is begging for trouble.

> 
> Regards,
> Ralf, aka Nick Name :D

Yeah, sorry about that - I was dealing with a catastrophically failing
HD controller at the time and was really not paying attention. I shall
flog myself an appropriate number of times. ;)

Petter


-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
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