Ubuntu 12.04 changed itself to xubuntu and stopped working

[silver.bullet at zoho.com]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:33:07 -0500, W Scott Lockwood III wrote:
>This will be my last response, I feel like we're (as usual) talking
>past each other.
>
>On 7/31/2015 11:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 31 July 2015 at 18:22, William Scott Lockwood
>> III<scott at guppylog.com>  wrote:
>>> >For extremely limited, specific versions of "Works". You keep
>>> >moving the goal posts here, Liam. That's completely different from
>>> >sharing a /home partition between two distros. That's selecting a
>>> >distro and staying with it. Not the same thing at all.
>> My main PC has Ubuntu 15.04, Crunchbang and Arch on it, all sharing
>> one /home but with 3 different user accounts. Previously, I have had
>> 4+ distros on a single machine -- e.g. the current Ubuntu and the LTS
>> plus 2 or 3 alternatives. If one is trying out distros and desktops,
>> it works very well. It's more efficient in disk space, it's easier to
>> switch environments for testing purposes. The only issue is
>> remembering which username goes with which distro. :¬)
>>
>> Really, it works, and when you have to do an upgrade or anything, it
>> pays for itself in time and effort saved.
>And the problem here is, as was mentioned in a previous post, some 
>distro's have different versions of Evolution, not all of which might
>be compatible with one another. So you've decided to make different
>user directories in /home - that's great - unless you actually want to
>USE Evolution for email on all of them. If you attempt to share the
>portion of your user directory that houses your Evolution data, you're
>risking corruption. If you duplicate it, you're wasting TONS of space,
>and your data stores WILL immediately begin to diverge, making any
>effort at deduplication practically impossible. IF (and this is a big
>if) all the distros you use treat Evolution the same way and use the
>same or similar enough versions, then this approach is fine. If not -
>as I said, the solution simply does not scale. This isn't about if it
>works for you, one single person, with one single computer, with one
>single /home directory with multiple accounts. If you do choose to
>respond, please address the Evolution angle, because you haven't. If
>you don't that's fine, you either understand what I wrote or you
>don't. I have no more time for this today.

My point of view isn't against sharing data, there are safe ways and
risky ways to do it, but what ever we chose, it's not as simple as
rebooting. For me the offending object is the claim "Partition your
disk with /home in a separate partition, shared by all of them, and
then switching distros is as easy as rebooting."
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Using several account names for user ID 1000 in one /home on a
separated partition, from my point of view, regarding my work-flow, does
gain big nothing. Using different IDs for the first user does make it
more complicated than using separated /home folders within / or on
separated partition for each distro or distro's release.

I've got a multi-boot with several Linux and a FreeBSD install and I'm
using POP accounts. For mails it might be better to use IMAP, but
speaking for other software, it depends what kind of data is shared.
I've got separated partitions and drives for music production data.
It's shared data. For configuration files each install has got it's own
home. And usually /home is within /.

For my usage of /home it makes no sense to share /home. Things I keep
for most installs are easy to copy, e.g. for .bashrc
PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$ '
export EDITOR="nano"
OTOH a new install is a good chance to tidy up and get rid of e.g.
aliases I never used.

However, usually if something is broken, we recommend to test the
software with a new test user account, to ensure that there are no
config issues in /home ;).

Everybody has got a different workflow, so there's no good or bad
solution, I only want to point out that sharing /home with
configurations among different distros IMO could cause trouble.

Regards,
Ralf