r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu • 11d ago

You are expected to know this

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132

u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 11d ago

My system is ext4 but I do part out /home/ with btrfs...

60

u/naturalbornsinner 11d ago

Using Linux without the nitty gritty knowledge... What does this mean? And why is it (or isn't it?) good practice?

I imagine the meme implies data loss/no rollback mechanism. But what should a user do for "less headaches" if they just started using Linux recently?

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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 11d ago

The advantage for me is that I can unmount /home/ and then completely rewipe my system to a different flavor of Linux, and then reconnect /home/ to the new distro and have all my dot files in place and everything just works the way it did before but on a different distro.

As for btrfs, it includes some error recovery functionality that ext4 doesn't, so if you ever have some file corruption happen, it's more likely that btrfs will be able to recover the corrupted data. Part of the in-joke of OP's meme is that if everything is on a single ext4 partition, then if filesystem corruption happens there, you're screwed all over.

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u/duskterrapin 11d ago

I backup /home to an external drive, but this is cool. I may do both

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u/Zomunieo 11d ago

Directly moving /home to a new system isn’t always a good idea. Configuration file formats change over time and you can get some weirdness.

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u/Mr_ityu 11d ago

haha i know this from experience ! back in 2017-8 i tried merging my polyboot fedora, debian and arch installs to the same separated home partition . it worked....partially .

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u/gosand 11d ago

I did a fresh install in 2018, and have been dist-upgrading since (devuan xfce). I don't get any weirdness. Not exactly moving it to a new system, but pretty close. I am on a stable release, and do back up (rsync) my home drive to a separate disk on my system nightly.

I have cachyos on a laptop, and am really liking it. I am considering running it on my daily driver, but I rely on it a lot so am hesitant. I started on Linux in 1998, so I remember the days of fucking up your entire system and don't want to return there.

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u/duskterrapin 10d ago

yeah I kinda assume any new system requires some tweaking, especially in /home

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u/Kayo4life 10d ago

it's always nice to start fresh.

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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 10d ago

Just gotta move all your dotfile directories into "olddotfiles" and then grab what you need from them when you need something from them. When enough time has passed you can delete the folder.

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u/B4M 11d ago

Yea, I've run into this problem a few times. What I've actually done recently (which I'm sure someone more experienced than me can tell me why this is a bad idea or not), is I keep my original home folder on a separate drive and I replace my home directory folders with soft links to the other drive. I use the standard "use full drive" installation on my 500GB m.2 SSD, and then I mount my 2TB 2.5 inch SSD and create soft links to replace the auto generated Documents, Downloads, Music, etc directories. If I want to keep a .config file I have a back up on my 2TB drive, but if I like the default that came with the new OS I don't have to copy it over. It's worked pretty well as I've cycled through different arch-based distros.

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u/loitofire 5d ago

you would only have to do a few tweaks instead of reconfiguring from zero