A transient home-directory?
For the past few years all my important work has been stored in git repositories. Thanks to the mr tool I have a single configuration file that allows me to pull/maintain a bunch of repositories with ease.
Having recently wiped & reinstalled a pair of desktop systems I'm now wondering if I can switch to using a totally transient home-directory.
The basic intention is that:
- Every time I login "rm -rf $HOME/*" will be executed.
I see only three problems with this:
- Every time I login I'll have to reclone my "dotfiles", passwords, bookmarks, etc.
- Some programs will need their configuration updated, post-login.
- SSH key management will be a pain.
My dotfiles contain my my bookmarks, passwords, etc. But they don't contain setup for GNOME, etc.
So there might be some configuration that will become annoying - For example I like "Ctrl-Alt-t" to open a new gnome-terminal command. That's configured on each new system I login to the first time.
My images/videos/books are all stored beneath /srv and not in my home directory - so the only thing I'll be losing is program configuration, caches, and similar.
Ideally I'd be using a smartcard for my SSH keys - but I don't have one - so for the moment I might just have to rsync them into place, but that's grossly bad.
I'll be interesting to see how well this works out, but I see a potential gain in portability and discipline at the very least.