Boot confusion

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 12 Jun 2021 at 03:09, Jack McGee <jack at greendesk.net> wrote:
>
> I guess I partition the 1tb SSD for 100 gig for 20.04 root filesystem.
> Maybe another backup root filesystem also.  Swap here also.

OK, fair enough. Big but no harm in that.

I avoid putting swap on SSD if I can, because in case of a memory leak
or something and the machine thrashing, it could potentially wear out
flash -- but to be honest it's a remote chance these days. If you have
enough RAM most modern machines will barely swap at all and you won't
notice the performance difference, but having swap on SSD means that
hibernation and wake will be much quicker.

> Nothing worth saving on the 1tb hard drive.  There are some old home
> directories I need to sort throuhh, but it's just 10.04, 14.04 old
> installations, etc

May be worth knowing that so long as the usernames are different, you
can consolidate lots of home *directories* onto a single home
*partition*.

I have had half a dozen distros sharing one home partition -- I save
my default `lproven` for Ubuntu LTS with Unity, and have `liamf` for
Fedora, `liamb` for Bodhi, `liamd` for Deepin, `liamx` for Xubuntu,
`liamm` for Mint, etc. Works 100% fine, no issues.

So long as there's no user account with $name on any particular
distro, it will never look in a folder called /home/$name. Doesn't
even matter if all the users are UID 1000, GID 1000 -- the name is
more important.

So you can mount all the old home partitions, rename the main account,
then copy them into one big /home partition and they won't interfere
at all.

-- 
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