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.