I've played around with different distros in VM's for several years for fun but only on the surface so I just have some basic knowledge but figured it was time to migrate and give it a go for real but before installing, I'm a bit hesitant about the whole separate /home partition thing. I understand that the main concept is that you can nuke your system partition when re-installing, trying different distros ect. but what are the actual benefits of keeping a separate home partition? You will obviously keep all your personal files, documents etc. but what about everything else? Settings? Configurations? Installed software? I assume it can/will cause conflicts if you keep everything on a /home partition while installing a different distro but will it actually work well even when re-installing the _same_ OS or can it still cause issues, missing symlinks etc. ? If you have setup certain software settings they likely require certain software and/or dependencies to function properly meaning you will basically have to create a 1:1 re-install anyway to be able to just keep sailing on the same configs etc....?