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Is it necessary to separate /home and / to different partitions?

Here are my guesses of two benefits of separation. Suppose /home is in the partition for /.

  • Is it still possible to reinstall a Linux installation by rewriting everything except the files in /home?

  • Is it still possible to share /home with multiple Linux installations?

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Is it necessary to separate /home and / to different partitions?

Not necessary but highly recommended.

Is it still possible to reinstall a Linux installation by rewriting everything except the files in /home?

Yes.

Is it still possible to share /home with multiple Linux installations?

Yes. Minor issues may occur if you co-install Ubuntu and Fedora because Fedora uses SeLinux and Ubuntu does not. restorecon will solve any issues regardless.

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  • How is the first achieved? As easy as in separate partitions?
    – Ben
    Oct 19, 2021 at 23:16
  • Use manual partitioning in your Linux installer. If you have a EFI computer, you must have at least EFI system partititon (200MB is enough), /boot (500MB is enough), / (root obviously) and /home. I prefer to use ext4 without LVM but you can choose anything you want. LVM/btrfs/zfs/etc. The reason I don't use them is because they make data recovery more difficult or even impossible. Backups, yes, but very few people backup daily or in real time.
    – Artem S. Tashkinov
    Oct 19, 2021 at 23:18
  • You may not need /boot as partition unless using LVM. And only share /home if set as different user, otherwise similar but different versions of software may write conflicting settings. Often better then to not have separate /home, but create a large data partition and mount that in multiple installs. The /home without data is tiny. My /home folder in / with all data in other partitions: 285.7 MiB /home
    – oldfred
    Oct 20, 2021 at 2:41
  • @ArtemS.Tashkinov What is the difference between EFI system partition and /boot? In nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/…, it says "NixOS by default uses the ESP (EFI system partition) as its /boot partition. It uses the initially reserved 512MiB at the start of the disk."
    – Ben
    Oct 20, 2021 at 11:19
  • The EFI System partition normally contains only the boot loader(s) and it's normally quite small ~ 100MB. /boot traditionally existed long before GTP and it contained Linux kernels (vmlinuz) and initial ramdisks and it can go grow a lot - each kernel with its ramdisk can occupy up to 50MB. 5 installed kernel versions and it's already 250MB. You can store everything in /boot but lots of distros will probably won't work with this configuration. For instance Fedora needs separate /boot and EFI System partitions.
    – Artem S. Tashkinov
    Oct 20, 2021 at 23:54

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