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1 • Share Data files but separate Home files (by Mike on 2020-03-09 00:27:01 GMT from Australia)
I use Linux Mint and Mint LMDE version. It is handy to have a spare distro as a test bed and also to access my data files if something disaster befalls my regular distro. The only problem I have found is that I set up a common Thunderbird mailbox but if I access it with the LMDE version then Mint will fail to access it. The 2 Mints use different versions of Thunderbird but fortunately I can easily restore my Mint configuration. A similar problem appeared today with Firefox which I have not yet had time to investigate; it s weird because when running one distro the /home folder of the other distro is not even mounted.
I would recommend using a separate partition for Data even if you only have 1 distro on your computer. It makes backups so much easier.
2 • Mandrake/Mandriva's legacy (by randomly generated entity on 2020-03-09 00:31:24 GMT from United States)
As someone that keeps versions of most of the major distros (19 of 'em! no MS anything for years now) installed and updated, using one or another as daily driver for a few weeks or months then moving on to something else for a while, the Mandr(ake/iva) branch of the distro family tree has always intrigued me. I can even recall paying for Mandriva back in maybe 2010-2011. It worked well, was easy enough for my even now limited skills, and looked good with my still preferred DE (KDE).
These days it seems that only Mageia is relatively close to the original in terms of quality and community, with only PCLinuxOS (which I consider to be a different beast in too many ways) also in the running. ROSA seems to have virtually disappeared (in popularity anyway) after having made some rather unfortunate changes to the plasma UI, and now we learn via this review that OpenMandriva - if one is to draw any conclusions from its web presence - is barely clinging to life.
The odd thing is, while I like Mageia (I run cauldron, the constantly updated bleeding-edge version) and it seems remarkably stable, I rarely find myself actually using it. Not even sure why that is... Maybe the somewhat outdated, only partially useful-anymore, once-a-huge-selling-point Control Center thing just doesn't seem as special any more (btw, no mention of that in the review? I assume it's there...)?
Anyway... just wanted to ramble and reminisce a little about this still viable (barely) corner of the Linux distro world, a world now overrun with Debian/Ubuntu and Arch variants. As a parting aside, where are all the openSUSE or Fedora variants? I know there are/have been a few. Just seems like there should be more, especially for openSUSE, which has such a rich infrastructure
3 • Home directories (by Romane on 2020-03-09 01:14:16 GMT from Australia)
Having a number of systems on my beastie, this quickly became an issue early in the piece.
Every install includes its own /home partition, with living under that. All settings and system-specific/user-specific live in that directly. For the rest, all my data files live in one completely separate directory. Links into the running systems native /home/ are placed into this.
Seems to work a charm mostly, but invariably there are permissions issues to be resolved before this setup become functional. Once the permissions are sorted, all is good.
I don't like directly mounting my /home/ partition directly in each system due to the conflicts which sometimes arise between the distro-specific steeings and files in each distro. Doing it this way means that these are kept completely separate from each other while all the data is shared commonly across all installed distros.
4 • OpenMandriva, non-systemd options (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-09 02:40:54 GMT from United States)
Like @2, I was also surprised not to see anything written in the review about the Control Center. That used to be the big selling point of Mandrake and all of its forks over the years. It's like reading about opensuse without seeing any comments about YaST.
OpenMandriva is another systemd distro to my knowledge. I wish more distros offered a non-systemd option like MX does. I really don't have much interest in trying systemd distros anymore, which seriously limits the amount of distro hopping I'm willing to do.
5 • @3 home directories (by Titus Groan on 2020-03-09 07:04:09 GMT from New Zealand)
likewise I found out that a shared home directory could have unusual consequences.
now, always separate / and /home and shared data disks and partitions between multiple systems
6 • Sharing a home directory between distributions (by multios user on 2020-03-09 09:45:00 GMT from Bulgaria)
I maintain completely separate home directories.
Different distros are not born equal and have different apps versions resulting in different settings. Additionally I use both linux and bsds on one computer, linux in sytemd and sysv variants too. It would be a severe blunder and a complete mess to mix home settings for different distros and oses, if possible at all provided that linux & bsd use different file systems mostly incompatible for file write operations. I'm amused by the creators blindness of the forthcoming 'great' systemd-homed thing.
7 • openmandriva (by no_cool on 2020-03-09 11:15:41 GMT from United States)
Roughly 20 years ago I began my linux journey with mandrake that was on the cover of a magazine. I too bought updates from them shipped to myself on cd with french stamps and postage (that intrigued my landlord at the time).
I swapped it for slackware (also of the cover of a magazine) while at version 10ce - this had problems for myself and I have not gone back to mand*.
Yes the control centre is somewhat outdated or outmoded - good in the day not so much now.
I dont even like using pclinuxos as it reminds me too much of mand*; and I have decided after all my struggles with rpms and dependencies that rpms are too much to deal with.
Long live the past...
8 • OpenMandriva (by Barnabyh on 2020-03-09 12:39:05 GMT from Germany)
One of the selling points of OpenMandriva was that it is compiled with musl if I remember correctly and supposed to be a tad faster in operation due to this.
However, I could not find any notable difference in daily operation and went for Mageia in the end which ran here last year for 6 months on one machine. Despite systemd, currently trying a few of them after having given it a wide berth for so long. Only for evaluation though.
Availability of packages was also a problem with OM. It seemed too restricted to me to make it worthwhile for daily use. They should just join up with Mageia. There are already three more descendent distros of Mandrake/Mandriva which had not had that many users for a long time before it went. From a resources point of view it would be smarter to bundle them instead of splitting the little man power available. And woman power, sorry!
9 • /home and Mandriva (by Friar Tux on 2020-03-09 12:45:23 GMT from Canada)
I use only one distro on my working laptop. I DO, however, have a 'testing' laptop to test/play with other distros. My version of distro hopping is to play with them on my 'tester' and, if they pass, they get saved on a flash drive. I actually don't have that many saved distros as only a very few pass the testing - all the Mint flavours, Q5OS, and MX-19_x64 (the only MX that worked). The rest had too many issues to be useful. My priorities are install the distro, and go to work. No post-install messing about to get things running, and for that matter, no pre-install messing about, either. Also, if it can't install itself from a flash drive I consider it a bust. (I'm picky that way. This IS the 21st century, after all.)
OpenMandriva, Mageia, and PCLinuxOS were all a bust for me. When I first tried them, they all show the same issues. It was when I checked what the parent distro was that I realized why. (I actually bought and ran Mandrake 3.1, way back when, but found it didn't work - it scared me back to Windows.)
10 • OpenMandriva (by Jesse on 2020-03-09 13:44:24 GMT from Canada)
@8: "One of the selling points of OpenMandriva was that it is compiled with musl if I remember correctly and supposed to be a tad faster in operation due to this."
OpenMandriva does not use musl (a C library). It builds packages with Clang (a compiler), rather than the more commonly used GCC. This is not intended to give a performance boost, instead it provides better debugging information to the developers.
11 • Partition size (by Ganesh on 2020-03-09 14:09:52 GMT from India)
How big do you suggest the partitions should be if you use root, home and data partitions?
12 • OpenMandriva (by Dave Postles on 2020-03-09 14:37:16 GMT from United Kingdom)
I too was an adopter of Mandriva in my early experience with Linux. I bought the USB stick with OM running live, which must have been pioneering at the time. It's not a great distro now, I think.
On another matter, for Linux newbies in Europe, distros will need to have the following automatic attributes:
1 LibreOffice Base has all elements, including java runtime and hsqdlb integrated;
2 VLC has gstreamer and libdvdcss integrated.
In which case, a distro developed in Europe is probably the answer for Linux newbies in Europe.
13 • @12 linux newbies in Europe (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 16:09:36 GMT from Sweden)
What are you talking about?
Personally, I disagree with both libreoffice and vlc. A distro should only provide the bare minimum, the user should decide which office suite and media player he/she wants.
For myself, I don't even want a desktop environment installed but, that maybe a bit too much for a newbie. Although, you never know, some learn fast.
14 • @13 newbies vs experts (by curious on 2020-03-09 16:26:34 GMT from Germany)
While I don't quite understand why java runtime and hsqdlb must be integrated in LibreOffice Base, it is clear that your personal needs are quite different from a newbie's. An expert knows what different software is available and - more importantly - which codecs are necessary for stuff to work.
Especially the gstreamer packages are named in such a way that many people do not understand which package they need to get the expected multimedia playback functionality.
So, more important than which specific multimedia player is used, it should include all the stuff needed to play back the usual suspects - i.e. mp3, various common video formats, and DVDs. Many distros actually do provide this functionality - or at least an easy one-click way to install the missing stuff.
15 • @14 newbie vs. expert (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 16:40:59 GMT from Sweden)
I would agree with you but, the things you mention are only a ddg/google search away.
I'm afraid that in the near future (now) most of the default installs will be heavily bloated.
Hopefully some basic installs will remain for those of us who prefer it like that.
16 • Mandrake/Multiple Distros (by Gary on 2020-03-09 18:12:13 GMT from United States)
I was given a copy of Mandrake 7.0 I believe it was by my Uncle who had learned about computers in the USAF using DOS. Me, not so much, and I struggled to get anything done. After about a decade (self-taught) I started again with Linux.The last time I used Windows was in 2013 when Windows 7 wouldn't recognize a large external HD and Linux would. Haven't looked back. I prefer a distro that does what I want and not one that makes me do it only the distro's way (MS). I use several desk-top and Notebook computers, most of them older. I'm guessing that the cause of distros using RPM running so much slower is because of the older hardware, but Debian and Arch-based distros run with little-to-no problems. The Desktops have 2-4 distros running and I keep the home directories synchronized in case of a problem.
17 • newbie vs expert (by Ram on 2020-03-09 18:41:41 GMT from India)
@15 I think, in respect to GNU Linux,
For newbie the clear winner is KDE Neon (user edition) or Ubuntu Studio and register in the Ubuntu Forum or Ask Ubuntu.
For newbie server managers the go to system is RHEL or CentOS and read their documentations and start searching the Internet.
For experts go to Arch or Gentoo or Nix or LFS+BLFS.
Actually, experts can play with any system; newbies matter. Just keep in mind, systemd/GNOME based systems are not good choice for tinkering.
18 • newbie vs expert (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 19:05:58 GMT from Sweden)
@17 Thanks for the tip but, I'll just stick with my laptop running NetBSD with spectrwm.
19 • Partitions (by Cheker on 2020-03-09 19:07:32 GMT from Portugal)
My two OS' have their own home folders, but they both have access to a separate partition (HDD) that contains most things. Come to think of it, the things you'd find in a typical home folder are there too, because I didn't want it taking space up on the SSD, where the OS' are installed.
20 • Shared data and applications (by PhilippE on 2020-03-09 19:50:47 GMT from France)
I have several distros installed on my PC and I need to access to my user documents from each one, but I want to keep separated config files. That's why I use separated $HOME but I share directories such Documents, Music, Images, Downloads, etc.
In addition I share /opt (where are firefox and Libreoffice) and a AppImage directory. This permits to share some applications and to upgrade them only once.
21 • poll question (by randomly generated entity on 2020-03-09 21:27:55 GMT from United States)
19 distros... how many separate home directories? 19! Mainly for config files and such, which do evolve over time as an OS/DE matures. Takes up so little space that there's no real reason to share ~ between distros for me.
I also have several storage drives used for data, to which I symlink from those directories.
The only non-standard thing I do is use the mozilla-provided binary of Firefox, which goes into the /opt folder of each distro. Saves me a lot of download bandwidth (19 dl's from the respective package managers adds up) and keeps me immediately up to date. I can even use the same profile for all of 'em (just copy the ~/.mozilla directory), saving configuration time and sync bandwidth.
22 • / and /data partitions (by M.Z. on 2020-03-09 23:41:58 GMT from United States)
I've been running a /data partition for years and multibooting distros in their own combined /root and /home partitions. No issues, though I understand trying to share /home causes issues with hidden config files that often start with a .dot.
@11 -'how big Q?'
The how big question depends entirely on how many programs you plan on installing & how big your drive is. If you're going to separate out a /data partition you may want to combine /root & /home for simplicity sake, though there may be some reason to separate them even with a /data partition I'm not aware of.
At any rate, I filled up at least one 30ish GB /root/home partition on an SSD when I was adding lots of programs from a Debian based distro once (a previous version of LMDE). I'd gues if you wanted a light distro & only a few programs you could squeeze by on less than 20GB, but if you want a fair number of big programs, you may want 50GB+ on /root/home.
Personally I do several 500MB /boot partitions, a like number of40 to 60GB partitions for /root/home on various distros, and then leave a few hundred GB at the end for /data, because I may never fill it up with my files, but It's nice to have extra space.
A helpful link on the process of setting it all up:
https://www.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/08/painless-linux.html
23 • Home (by Rich on 2020-03-10 00:18:10 GMT from United States)
With multiple distros on the same machine, after efi, swap and root partitions, I leave the rest of the drive for a home partition where all the home directories go. What I do is create different user accounts per distro, for example rich-ubuntu, rich-manjaro, rich-fedora etc....
24 • KDE Neon (by Dark Man on 2020-03-10 12:17:56 GMT from United States)
@17 For the user who wants a "minimalist" distro, KDE Neon is an excellent choice. It comes with few apps installed. Extremely lean. Although for that reason, I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie. Something like Kubuntu would be better.
25 • Feature story - review OpenMandriva (by Val on 2020-03-10 17:24:03 GMT from Canada)
And again there is no real info about system performance...
No RAM consumption, no boot time...
26 • Home (by Mike C on 2020-03-10 21:54:13 GMT from United States)
I dual-boot Windows 7 and Mint on several machines. Those all have a 'Common' partition formatted for NTFS. Why Windows 7? Simple, Linux doesn't have the drivers for my Lexmark color printer (4079PS2) or my scanner. Also, I use TurboTax which doesn't support Linux (and next year won't work under Windows 7 - may have to upgrade to Windows 10).
The printer cost over $3,000 new a long time ago and I have several hundred dollars worth of ink cartridges. It does an excellent job and I see no reason to quit using it. I use a black & white laser printer for everyday printing and it is supported under Linux. I know Windows 7 is a security risk but it is no longer configured to use WiFi nor Ethernet - it is isolated when in use. I use Common to store anything I want to print and simply re-boot into Windows 7 for the print job(s). This is a pain in that I have to stop doing everything else while I print and I would like nothing more than to get the appropriate driver for the printer so I could just stay in Linux. The scanner can be easily and cheaply replaced with something more current...but why spend the money when I have to maintain Windows 7 just for the printer?
27 • @25 (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-11 02:56:43 GMT from United States)
> And again there is no real info about system performance...
> No RAM consumption, no boot time...
Didn't seem necessary. When a distro is in poor shape and not terribly useful, performance, or lack thereof, is much less relevant.
28 • Home, printer (by Angel on 2020-03-11 03:38:59 GMT from Philippines)
@26, Not sure if this is of interest: That's quite an old printer, but if it connects by USB you can use a Windows VM for TurboTax and the Lexmark and avoid the dual-boot. Also, a VM can be copied and used in any of your PCs. Of course, you may need a Windows license for the VM. I had a Brother printer where I had to keep reinstalling the Linux driver. The Windows VM worked well, and could even be connected to it's own WiFI by using a dongle. (BTW, you still should be able to upgrade to WIn 10 for free.)
@23, I also use slightly different users in a common home partition to avoid conflicts, but I also have a separate partition where data from all distros is shared.
29 • Directiories (by Jim on 2020-03-11 11:43:18 GMT from United States)
I dual boot Ubuntu Mate and Parrot. I do not share directories as I use Ubuntu Mate for common things, and Parrot for privacy and security reasons. This is a question I have asked other places, and it has never been answered.
If I dual boot, and a cryptolocker attacks, can it encrypt the part of the drive that is not mounted? If it encrypts partition one that is mounted, does unmounted partition two also get encrypted?
If partition two does not get encrypted, that would be a reason to not share directories. An answer from someone more knowledgeable than me will be appreciated.
30 • Sharing "Home" directories (by OstroL on 2020-03-11 11:54:36 GMT from Poland)
When you install a Linux distro, it creates a home directory, usually. But, no one is asking the user to save every file or folder to that directory. If you have multi Linuxes are installed, and you need to have your personal files/folders in a separate partition? If that partition is formatted ntfs, anything in that can be accessed from Linux and Windows. All you have to remember is to close Windows fully. If you are dual booting with Windows, fast start-up would be disabled any way.
31 • @29 (by Jake on 2020-03-11 17:30:07 GMT from United States)
It depends on the malware. I have heard of ransomware that looks for networked backups to encrypt (NAS or Samba shares) but not all strains do. It's an interesting question I have wondered myself but I'm sure it comes down to amount of effort versus benefit gained. Linux malware is generally low for that reason versus Windows or Android.
32 • /home (by Murdock2525 on 2020-03-12 15:46:35 GMT from Costa Rica)
Hard drive space is cheap these days(not as cheap as many Linux users) so I run a /Data-copy of dropbox and all photos and leave each distro and /home on its own partition.
33 • Sharing a home directory (by homedir on 2020-03-13 13:45:40 GMT from Portugal)
To those who don't like to see the arrow at the bottom corner of linked icon folders:
don't remove the distribution's Documents directory and:
instead of
ln -s /Data/jesse/Documents Documents
do
sudo mount --bind /Data/jesse/Documents /home/jesse/Documents
Number of Comments: 33
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| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Nature's Linux
Nature's Linux was a Linux-based operating system developed by Japan's Nature's Linux Alliance. Its main focus was security.
Status: Discontinued
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View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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