castrojo:

For some reason people always think that having seperate / and /home partitions is necessary to having a healthy Ubuntu system.

I don’t know why people keep recommending this but I am doing my best to spread the word that you don’t need to go through all that noise. If you don’t believe me you…

I have to disagree with Castrojo. I separate my home from root, and the benefits are awesome. I’ve had the same /home partition since I first installed Debian before Ubuntu existed. It’s been such a marvelous boon for my data integrity that I wish Ubuntu would do this by default for new users without even telling them about it. New users would do a reinstall of the latest Ubuntu and find all their files still there. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I’ve formatted a Windows computer to have a customer ask, “So where are my files?” Even when I explain over and over that we are deleting everything and starting over. People don’t really grasp what that means until they sit down at their computer and realize what’s missing. Over time users forget what wasn’t installed by default.

(Source: ubuntu.stackexchange.com)