You can share your /home
partition directly, but you'll likely find problems with things like theming and other configurations when you do. This is because you're not only sharing the stuff you want, like ~/Documents
and such, but also all of the hidden configuration directories like ~/.local
as well. While most every distro uses the same visible directories, they are less likely to store their config files in the same places as others.
To get around this, I mount my "universal" home directory somewhere other than /home
, e.g. /mnt/home
instead. Then I symlink the folders that I care about to each distro's /home
directory, e.g ln -s /mnt/home/<username>/Music ~/
. It works across all Linux distros as well as other Unices (as long as they can read the filesystem that you put your universal /home
on...ZFS is great for this). I've used this successfully to share my ~/*
directories between Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS installs at one time or another. But it still lets each distro or OS have its own configurations without interfering with the other stuff you're multibooting with it.
Sounds like you've got it right. As long as you tell opensuse to mount your existing home directory somewhere besides
/home
you'll be fine. Even if you do mount it at/home
it won't delete or overwrite it, you'll just get lots of conflicts with the "foreign" pre-existing configuration files. So yeah, mount it somewhere like/mnt/home
and opensuse will leave it alone and make its own/home
directory on its own partition, and then you can symlink to your existing mounted partition.As for
grub
, it depends on how you do it. If you go with the defaults you'll probably overwrite kubuntu'sgrub
with opensuse'sgrub
. If so, opensuse will probably detect your kubuntu installation and make an entry for kubuntu. Especially if you're not planning on keeping kubuntu around long-term this'd be the way to go. It'll work if you want to keep kubuntu as well, but if you don't want to keep kubuntu around definitely go with this.Alternately, you could tell opensuse to not install
grub
when you install it. This would leave kubuntu'sgrub
installed and in charge, and then you'd go back into kubuntu and regenerategrub
's configuration with theupdate-grub
command and kubuntu'sgrub
will detect your new opensuse install and add a menu entry for opensuse. This will keep your boot experience the same except for your new opensuse option, but you'll have to keep kubuntu around since it's still in charge of your boot menu.Regardless of which option you choose, if you keep both operating systems installed you'll likely have to go into the os in charge of
grub
and manually updategrub
every time you install a new kernel in the os that isn't in charge ofgrub
. It's not hard, but it is another thing to remember.