On 20/11/2018 12:58, jdd@dodin.org wrote:
yes - but not a file system, only a folder
OK, yes, that is correct. But normally a filesystem too on a competently-administered multiuser host machine. :-)
I see this as unnatural, but if it fits your needs... and with different distros in the same /home, managing users permissions and groups can be complicated
One of the problems of the PC architecture is that it's a de-facto standard. It just evolved out of lots of companies doing their own thing and pulling in different directions. Other systems are far more tightly-governed. On SUN boxes, for instance, SUN and a small handful of licensed companies governed how stuff worked. Original Apple 680x0 Macs were a single-company game and didn't really support other OSes at all. PowerPC Macs were gradually opened up, first because of the licensing programme, then because PC industry kit got good enough, so gradually, PowerMacs got industry-standard PCI slots, industry-standard EIDE disk controllers, USB ports, memory slots, etc. and lost all their proprietary Apple ports and expansion slots. There used to be a fairly strict mechanism for PC partitioning, applied and followed by DOS, OS/2, Windows 3.x and 9x and NT. 1 primary partition per drive, and these were enumerated first; then 1 extended partition, with logical drives in that. Most non-MS operating systems ignored it and did their own thing inside a primary partition (of which PCs only supported 4 per disk). Most non-MS OSes remained marginal and most died off. Linux went "fair enough, we will play" and used the MS partitioning scheme and never introduced its own -- it had its own _disk formats_, sure, but inside DOS/Windows-style partitions. The BSDs never learned this lesson and they never got as far as Linux did. Now, GPT is making all this irrelevant. Unfortunately, GPT goes hand-in-hand with UEFI, and the FOSS world has been largely excluded from UEFI. A few big enterprise vendors paid and got their kernels signed. Free distros are out in the cold. Getting a free non-enterprise Linux distro booting on a UEFI-only machine with GPT disks remains hard.
there are problems copying files between linux and ntfs (incompatible characters in names)
It can happen. I don't use Maildir, so it has never really affected me. I would not keep /home on NTFS but symlinking Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads etc. from an NTFS volume into a home directory on /home/$username seems to work very well. Not so with Dropbox any more, unfortunately. :-( -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org