[Discuss] Strategy for dual boot (two LINUX distros) to share most files on /home directory

[Murray Strome]

I would like to do some longer term comparisons between Ubuntu (or 
XUbuntu) and Zorin OS. I plan to do a fresh install of both on a new 
hard drive.  I have the /home directory backed up. I would like to set 
things up so that the key settings (e.g. .thunderbird, .jpilot, .mozilla 
and perhaps others) would be shared between them, as well as all my 
documents.

I am thinking that I could have a separate partition (e.g. call it data) 
for all that kind of information, then in each of the distro's I could 
make symbolic links to the appropriate files in the data partition.

Has anyone done something like this? Is there a better way to do it?

Thanks.

Murray