Multiple Distros Sharing Home Folder & Some Other Questions

Hi all Linux Gurus,

I am a fairly new Linux user and have been dabbling a bit in Linux for the past couple of months or so, on a light usage basis. I have some questions which I hope to learn. I have included some simple background on why I am trying out Linux. Feel free to skip it as it does not relate to my questions.

Quote:

The main reason I am looking into Linux is because I was very upset with the way Windows 10 is handling their update policies. I usually leave my PC overnight and on multiple occasions, Windows 10 just restarted out of the blue with no warning whatsover, resulting in me losing my work. A few occasions, it even resulted in me having to do some troubleshooting in the audio and display stuff as it was giving me problems right after the update. I am an above average Windows 10 user, who is alright to diagnose and troubleshoot problems when it is really required. However, with my increased responsibilities these days, I would rather spend my time relaxing and watching YouTube videos or playing games and not having to do all of those PC diagnostics if I can help it. Hence I am actually looking for a Linux distro to suite my needs, and I have gotten some good feedback from the friendly forums of Manjaro and openSUSE before this. Regarding my preference, I strongly prefer a distro with a good GUI and properly laid settings, like YaST in openSUSE. But this is another discussion altogether.

I have tested Manjaro initially, and then tried openSUSE. I am fairly happy with both of them, though both did give me some minor issues in getting up the WiFi initially. I have a fairly standard PC, Dell XPS 8910 (Intel i7 6700, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX 960) with 3 storage drives:

A. 512GB SSD - for Windows 10 installation along with its program
B. 2TB HDD - for Windows 10 data (am open to use it for Linux as well in the future)
C. 256GB SSD - planning to use this for Linux testing, currently have Manjaro and openSUSE on it, but plan to reformat it and redo the partitioning.

The general set-up would be to multi-boot my PC with Windows 10 on my 512GB SSD and all of the other Linux distros on the 256GB SSD. I plan to go on a distro-hopping / testing spree and would like to set up the 256 GB SSD in such a manner that I don't have to re-do my personal files and folders every time I test out a new distro. I have googled around and found this article below:

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20200309#qa

Quote:

Sharing a home directory between distributions Looking for a place to call home asks: Is it safe to share a home directory between distros? What are the best practises for maintaining one home with two or three or four distros? DistroWatch answers: It is possible to share the same /home partition (or home directories) between Linux distributions. From a technical side of things there isn't anything which prevents one distribution from mounting the same /home partition used by another distribution [1]. Once the /home partition is mounted though there are some potential problems with sharing the same home folders between distributions. For instance, if your user account has a different identification number (UID) on each system you may run into permission problems. Most distributions start numbering user accounts at 1,000 and go up incrementally, but not all do. If your user IDs start at different points (for example, 500 versus 1,000), or you create your user accounts in a different order on each distribution, then the permissions will not be the same for each account and you may have trouble accessing your own files because they will be associated with different UIDs. Another problem, and a more common one, is different distributions will have different default settings. They are also likely to run different versions of programs which may save their options in your home directory differently. This can lead to programs not working properly or desktop environments breaking when they do not recognize the settings saved by another version in the same directory. You may also end up overwriting your settings for one distribution when you are working in another. To get around this, people will often maintain separate home directories for each distribution while maintaining one common space for data files and information that they wish to share between systems. This is typically done by settings up one large, common, shared partition that can be accessed by all distributions. We might call this partition /Data. Under /Data we might have directories like: jesse/Documents jesse/Downloads jesse/Music guest/Documents guest/Downloads In our home directory we can then make symbolic links to this shared /Data directory. Here I remove my distribution's Documents directory and link it to the shared equivalent space in /Data: cd rmdir Documents ln -s /Data/jesse/Documents Documents Now whenever I save a file in my Documents folder, it goes into the shared partition which can be accessed from each distribution. Meanwhile my configuration files for each distribution remain separate, in my local /home folder rather than in the shared space where they may conflict with my accounts on the other systems. The key to this approach is making sure you create a large, shared data partition ahead of time, maybe when you install the first distribution. Then you can add as many additional distributions as you wish later, each one having its own home folders. Then each distribution can mount the shared data partition and users can link to the shared storage space. * * * * * 1. There is an exception. If you are using a non-standard filesystem or one that is not widely supported across distributions yet, such as ZFS, then it may not mount properly across all distributions. Standard Linux filesystems like ext2/3/4 and XFS are generally supported on all distributions.

Question 1
How do I execute the steps in the article exactly? The cd command does not specify which path to change directory to. Which folder should I cd to?

Question 2
Related to Q1, would it be correct to say that I would need to set these partitions up:

i. Data - containing all of my audios, movies,
ii. Swap - to be shared across all Linux distros. I don't use hibernate function at all.
iii. 2 new partition for every single distro - / (root) and /home

And subsequently, I would perform a symbolic link of the folders in /home to my Data partition for each of the /home folders?

Question 3
I have read a lot about bricking my computer. Is there any chance that I can brick my bootloading screen when I mess around with various sudo commands in Linux, resulting me not able to enter Windows 10 as well?

I mean, I don't mind bricking a particular Linux distro, and having to reinstall it while I experiment things in it. I was also planning to unmount both the 512GB SSD and 2TB HDD in all of my Linux distros so as to prevent accidentally erasing any data on it. Am I doing this right?