[PLUG] separate partition for /home

[Kunal Thakar]

Hi everyone,
                    My linux desktop distro keeps changing and I have tried
a lot of distros till now. Lately I have settled on Ubuntu but inspite of
that I keep reinstalling the OS again and again for multitude of reasons.
Everytime, my procedure was to backup my /home folder to my windows
partition and move it back into the newly installed distro.

Only lately did I realize that maintaining a separate partition for /home
could solve my woes to a large extent. The question is that will it be
necessary to remove all the hidden folders from /home like .gnome2, .gconf
and all the rc files when I want to install a new distro? If I am installing
a newer version of the same distro, is it ok to keep these files so as to
preserve my settings?
Are there any other disadvantages of keeping a separate /home partition?

Kunal