Improving The Linux Desktop: 20 Needed Fixes

I'll say it again: Matt Hartley writes decent articles - only not for Daniweb.

People asked me of some proofs, well, here it is. Thanks Matt!

Agreed. And I definitely concur on dedicated Home partitions.

Dedicated home partitions are only mostly reliable for reinstalls, for sharing installs, unless you know ahead of time what your doing it's absolute drek. user home is set by UID which will change by defualt from one distro to the next. Better would be a dedicated storage partition.Do support for awhile, you'd be amazed how many time a times a dedicated home has screwed someone over.

There are other opinion based 'facts' scattered through the article, overall not bad though.

He was actually reasonable in this one.

@ azerthoth

I am actually surprised you would think that way. While I see the point about having a dedicated storage partition, most home users would see a separate /home as a vast improvement to losing info in a distro upgrade or reinstall (as many new users are "apt" to do).

My wife, for instance, complains mostly of lost icons & bookmarks after I do a distro upgrade (version change, not the apt-get upgrade kind). Rarely does she complain about lost document files. She doesn't keep much like that. But lose her saved web links & passwords?!?! Watch out!!!

Quoting: Matt Hartley writes decent articles - only not for Daniweb.

Are you thinking of Ken Hess? I don't believe Matt has a Daniweb column. He used to write for madpenguin.org, and those pieces got roasted here regularly.

Yes a minor amount of pain at install time (creating separate root and home partitions), pain that could easily be mitigated by the distributors, by making it possible to create a home partition on the fly, saves a lot of pain at upgrade/reinstall time.

I know that Canonical are trying to dumb down the install process as much as possible, but surely adding 1 radio button that says something like "I want a separate area to store my personal files", that causes the installer to create seperate root and home partitions.

On the other hand, by not providing separate root and home partitions Canonical are making their less technical users, the ones they really want, more dependent on Canonical's upgrade manager, as potentially not being easily able to upgrade/change distributions, does create a sort of lock in for such users.

What I don't understand is why derivative distributions, like Mint, don't add such a function to the installer, especially as Mint doesn't use the Ubuntu upgrade tool.

Quoting:most home users would see a separate /home as a vast improvement to losing info in a distro upgrade or reinstall

Speaking of that... I don't know if Fedora has taken a turn for the worse in that regard, or if it's always been this way and I just never saw it.

I tried upgrading my mom's desktop to Fedora 13 while my parents were on vacation. Everything went swimmingly through the initial info-gathering stage, and I told it not to format /home. But when I got to the "final approval" prompt, it said it would write the partition table.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!

I re-booted and tried again, making sure I changed no partitions, and indicated not to format /home. Same results, hence, no upgrade.

A few weeks later, that computer had to go in for warranty service, so I removed the hard drive and sent it on its way. I brought an older substitute system for the interim, but since the hard drive is a laptop drive, we couldn't access the files on the interim system. That gave me the perfect opportunity to make the case for an external, USB backup drive.

She got a 350G drive for $55. Not bad, considering her /home is just over 2G, mostly photos and emails. And she knows that if the system goes belly-up again, it will be a matter of small work to recover her /home.

@jasep thats the advantage of a dedicated storage partition, cp -rv ~/ to it, as long as you cp -rv and not -rvp when you move it back, all permissions are automagically migrated. Mind you I usually only move selected files, mozilla, xchat, etc. I have seen too many people blindly trust that ~/ is ~/ the world around when it's not and they end up with epic fail. Yes it's recoverable but annoying.

Nothing beats a backup.

tar zpcfv fullbackup.tgz /bin /boot /dev /etc /home /lib /lib64 /lib32 /libexec /media /mnt /opt /root /sbin /usr /var

^^ mine ^^

Oh darn TC, you're right, I knew something was wrong when I wrote that before having coffee. The cheap coffee I bought last week was not drinkable at all and tasted like sawyer, maybe that's the problem.

Hmm, than I should have said madpenguin I guess. Yet another pleasant surprise of someone being able to write decent articles.

Anyway, I don't understand all the fuss about the separate home partition though: What's the problem? If you upgrade some distro, why on earth would it want to repartition? That's just pointless!

It just 'updates' some files in /usr, maybe some cache in /var and configurations in /etc and that should be all, right?

So, if an update never touches /home (as my distro does), than what would the benefit of a separate /home be during upgrades? OK, it's a way to make sure the /home partition isn't filled with /usr and /var stuff, but that's not mentioned.

Apart from that, using /home for multiple distro's - like Az says - probably is not a good idea. Before you know it they start conflicting as both might have different versions of certain programs.

Moreover, nowadays I found out it's really a good idea to make a backup before updating. Someone actually working in IT once wrote you should have a rollback-plan before doing some upgrade/ migration, and I recently found out that's the best idea since making the wheel round!

@ azerthoth

I'm not arguing the technical aspects or merits of what you are saying. It's just that most new users don't have tech support, & can't navigate a command line to save their lives, even IF they have backup storage. I think a simple choice of a separate /home partition would better position the Posix strengths of Linux-based OSes.

for a new user a seperate home is a fallacy, its only functional most of the time for a reinstall. A ~/ in ubuntu cant be just mapped in to gentoo, the default UID's are wrong. Arguing a seperate ~/ is like arguing pizza toppings, the only reason for any of them is because you like it.

Quoting:for a new user a seperate home is a fallacy, its only functional most of the time for a reinstall. A ~/ in ubuntu cant be just mapped in to gentoo,

So what. the majority of people are not going to do that, what they need is a seperate home partition to keep their data safe in the event of an upgrade failure, or if they choose to reinstall, and for those that will it won't be a problem.

I use the home trick on my desktop, its great for switching distros which i try out a lot, as for the uid problem it isnt a problem thats what "chown user:user /home/user -R" is for, it has never failed me.

One caveat dont use it on anything your scared of losing as mistakes happen, unless of course you have proper backups in place. Nothing can ever replace a proper backup.

And I should point out, on some Ubuntu derivatives, such as Mint, reinstall is the only upgrade option, and having a seperate home partition is a lot easier than backing up your home contents reinstalling then restoring your home contents.

@ azerthoth

What traceyanne said...

And, I have never had a problem going from, say, Ubuntu to SuSE or Fedora & having Gparted pick up the partition during install. I imagine that doing it manually in fstab would be a real hassle though.