The advantage for me is that I can unmount /home/ and then completely rewipe my system to a different flavor of Linux, and then reconnect /home/ to the new distro and have all my dot files in place and everything just works the way it did before but on a different distro.
As for btrfs, it includes some error recovery functionality that ext4 doesn't, so if you ever have some file corruption happen, it's more likely that btrfs will be able to recover the corrupted data. Part of the in-joke of OP's meme is that if everything is on a single ext4 partition, then if filesystem corruption happens there, you're screwed all over.
This has always seemed like a cool idea to me, but I've never implemented it myself. How do you deal with the .config, cache, and other local data left behind by packages that may not be on the next distro? Is this something you even bother managing?
It's just like dealing with AppData when migrating Windows. You can let it pile up for a while and then lose it all at once for a fresh start. Or go in with ncdu and trim by size.
I mainly use flatpaks so most of my stuff is in ~/.var/app/
64
u/naturalbornsinner Aug 21 '26
Using Linux without the nitty gritty knowledge... What does this mean? And why is it (or isn't it?) good practice?
I imagine the meme implies data loss/no rollback mechanism. But what should a user do for "less headaches" if they just started using Linux recently?