Don't share a /home
, share the personal files in /home/$USER/
. The reason not to do that is so that you keep all the config files out of it. You can set up synch for browsers if you need to share bookmarks.
Create a mount point on a partition (not on the system disk). If you also want to use Windows with it use a partition formatted as NTFS otherwise use EXT4. Move the personal directories to a partition and share that for all your systems.
To link your /home/$USER/
to that partition see ~/config/users-dirs.dirs
.
If you need to use different user IDs you can set the partition up with a group and add users on all system to the same group ID.
This way a re-install means to format your /
and mount (and not format) your partition with the same filesystem.
I have been using this for well over a decade:
rinzwind@schijfwereld:/$ ls -ltr
total 80
drwxrwxrwx 14 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 mrt 19 17:26 discworld
...
rinzwind@schijfwereld:/$ ls -ltr discworld/
total 56
drwxr-xr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 okt 3 2021 Public
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 okt 3 2021 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 okt 3 2021 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 9 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 sep 22 2022 Videos
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 okt 5 2022 scripts
drwxr-xr-x 4 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 dec 24 22:19 Music
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 mrt 19 17:26 vpn
drwxr-xr-x 6 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 5 14:34 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 3 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 8 14:32 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 4 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 8 14:58 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 7 rinzwind rinzwind 4096 apr 8 18:28 Desktop
and users-dirs.dirs
contains:
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="/discworld/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/discworld/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="/discworld/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="/discworld/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="/discworld/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="/discworld/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="/discworld/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/discworld/Videos"