Can 14.04 be used with Home partition from another install

[SuperFreak]

Sorry if this is a lame question.
I have 12.04 installed on my PC and it is working fine. I have a 38 GB unallocated disc space on my SSD and I am considering installing 14.04 there and keeping my old install intact. I realize I have enough room for a new Home partition along with Root but wondered if instead I installed Root and just used the Home partition I use presently with 12.04. Would this create conflicts?

[oldfred]

There always is a potential of conflicts if multi-booting. Software is designed to upgrade or update to new version, but if changes are significant then old version may not work or give strange results.

I have many installs and keep /home inside / (root), but have separte /mnt/data partition that is just all the data without any settings.

Data can be shared without the possible conflicts of user settings being different in different versions. I only copy some settings from one install to the next, normally. But I have to separately back up /home and the /data partition. Also saves the error of reformating a /home partition accidentally. I never reformat my /data and just configure / for install.

Splitting home directory discussion and details:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1811198
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1901437
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=%2Fdata
Link is on move home but see post by bodhi.zazen on data partition #6
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=325048
Severals posts on size of / and use of linking to data partition.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2137726

[SuperFreak]

Thank You

[grahammechanical]

You will also get newer versions of some of the default applications. For example, you will have two versions of Libreoffice accessing and writing to the same user folder in /home. How that will work out is any body's guess. Trusty Tahr at present has Libreoffice 4.1.2.3 and may well get Libreoffice 4.2 by the time 14.04 is released.

Keep 14.04 with its own /home folder and use the file manager to open the 12.04 partition and then point Libreoffice to your documents in the 12.04 partition. It will remember where the documents are but that 12.04 partition will need to be opened or mounted otherwise Libreoffice will give a cannot find error message. We can do the same with applications like Rhythmbox.

This is what I do and I have all my documents on a separate data partition.

Regards.

[SuperFreak]

Thanks grahammechanical