Canonical wisdom is to have separate / and /home so you can wipe system easily.
I upgraded by grepping for the packages that were breaking resolution and removing them. But I already know the failure mode so that whole thing took a few minutes.
I do not use Linux on my desktop or notebook but I would like to do so in the near future. This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times?
How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?
I imagine having ZFS snapshots of / would be useful for updates going forward.
I've gone through 3 laptops now with a migrated home. That included ubuntu -> arch -> fedora migration too. It works pretty well. (with more issues between distros than between version upgrades)
> This means I should strive to keep all my user created data within the home directory at all times?
Why would the user have privileges to save it outside of the home directory? :) Special cases like databases with storage in /var need to be handled separately.
> How about program preferences and configs that get saved elsewhere by default?
Nothing goes (should go) elsewhere by default.
If you're wiping the distro and re-installing - you probably don't want to keep /etc anyway.
Fwiw Ubuntu in place lts to lts release upgrade should be solid. But sometimes you want start with new, contemporary defaults, or a different disk layout.
BTW with zfs, you can have a separate home (or home/your_user) filesystem, and not worry about allocating fixed space (thus running out of free space on /, but with more available in /home and vice-versa).
I upgraded by grepping for the packages that were breaking resolution and removing them. But I already know the failure mode so that whole thing took a few minutes.
I do have separate mounts for that reason though.