Hi, I have the following idea. With the desktops becoming increasingly customizable and much of the data now being stored in the desktop enviroment implementation specific format (for example nepomuk and strigi's file index). , I was thinking may be its time to consider separation of user configuration data from user data. For example, I used to have a dual boot of an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and a Fedora 14/15 on my laptop till a few days back. I started working on a project two years ago and it just got over now. I use my laptop for both software development specific to that project (10.04 LTS) and normal desktop use (Fedora 15). Of course there was a mismatch of configuration files in the /home/<user> directory. The solutions to the problems were indicated by having a small and different home partitions and a common big data partition and then linking the folders in data partition to home partitions of the the directories. As always, linking brings book-keeping on my part. I was thinking, what if we implemented this configuration in the system itself? Basically what we can have is as follows: The configuration files are stored in a separate partition, let say in the directory /home.conf.d/<user> where each OS mounts its own /home/conf.d/. The directory is owned by the user and then the functioning continues as before only that paths now change like $HOME/.bashrc to $HOMECONF/.bashrc other thing which can be done is that the filesystem of the configuration files can be stored as a .img image file in some directory (let say /etc/user.conf.d/) and then whenever the system boots.. the img is mounted onto some location defined as $HOMECONF and then the processing goes as usual. This would help in separating the programs from the actual user data and hence allow more portability of the user data. Right now even though you can port data between operating systems. You can frequently lose configurations due to the same(Using different version of KDE on both OS). However there is issue between handling of files like .bashrc which are OS independent generally and are sometimes really useful. Should we have to duplicate them, how do I transfer from .bashrc from one OS to other OS. That is the answer we might like to find out. One of my suggestion is that such architecture independent files can be stored in an folder in the $HOME directory and that full folder be linked to a appropriate directory in $HOMECONF during login and then unlinked during logout. I've never posted on the mailing list and this is my first idea. So I'll be okay if you call it dumb. I'll only learn in the process I guess. Thanks Cheers and Regards, Jayesh Vinay Badwaik ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We are servants rather than masters in mathematics --- Charles Hermite