All sharing the same home directory. Each with their own 1 gig boot partition and 50 gig root partition. I feel like they each need to be running a different desktop so that the setting don’t need retweaked on each boot up. I’ve had issues with rendering my Conky info bar across the bottom of my screen when different distos all sharing the same home directory are running the same desktop. On my 1 tb nvme drive I had arch and Manjaro sharing the same home dir. while artix and endeavour shared another but with two fairly large home directories each with steam games installed, I was running out of space. So my question is which 4 desktops/window managers to use to avoid conflicts with how the desktop is rendered on screen. I already know that running open box and lx-de/qt causes problems with how each distro displays my conky on screen. If you were going to share a home partition across 4 distros or more, which desktops would you run to avoid conflicting configs? Someone does this? Let me hear from you.
Personally I wouldn’t be doing this. I just install each one in one partition of its own and have a data partition to be shared between them. I think at the end sharing the home directory between distros will end up in conflicts. Lacking the knowledge, speaking for myself, to seek the needle in a haystack, I avoid such a set up.
I agree with @pebcak
I share only certain parts of the $HOME directory on a multi-boot system.
Like folders: Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and some others that are not dependent on the Desktop Environment nor the operating system.
So essentially I create a (large) partition and mount it to something like /data
in /etc/fstab. Under /data I add folders like the above: Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.
Then I symlink these folders to $HOME.
Similarly some special cases like /data/.thunderbird can be symlinked (=shared) into $HOME.
(Note that if you have many users, you probably want to have folders like
/data/user1/Documents, /data/user2/Documents, etc.)
Example about symlinks:
/home/user1/Documents -> /data/user1/Documents
/home/user1/.thunderbird -> /data/user1/.thunderbird
That way different distros do not disturb the essential user data, and can have their special DE related settings not conflicting with each other.
Note that this involves some manual work on each distro, but is worth it.
Seconded. I used to have a shared home directory across multiple distros Eos/Antergos, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. It was problematic to say the least.
So now I use symlinks for Documents, Downloads etc.
This works quite well.
If you are sharing a $HOME between similar distros with the same versions of packages (like different installations of the same base distro) then it will work fine - the issues arise when you are sharing configuration files between different versions of the same software. This is a reason why Firefox implemented a profile date check so older versions of Firefox don’t accidentally use a profile for a newer version of Firefox.
Sharing a $HOME between Ubuntu LTS 16.04 and Arch is not likely to go well, though! 
Just incidentally, I would ask you if you installed just these four distributions so you can compare how they work? 
If the question was directed at me, then I “grew up” using OpenSuSE, Ubuntu was work related and Antergos/EoS was me trying to use arch.
I don’t use OpenSuSE anymore, but I do have Ubuntu installed, I haven’t got rid of it as I wasn’t sharing sharing Firefox directories and the Ubuntu installation has some context that I need to use occasionally.
Haven’t figure out how to migrate that across yet.
I am on EoS 95% time.
I just recently started using OpenSuse again, namely Tumbleweed. It seems pretty mature to me mainly because I was still using version 11.
I’m with @pebcak on this as well.
Well i have 3 oses using the same home dirt atm, arch, eos, and manjaro. i tried eos i3 but its a little weird for me. tiling is fine the thing is that apps dont always have an easy way to close them without restarting the system - hypnotix for example, the shortcut for fullscreen wasnt working and when i set it to fullscreen through the gui control the only way out was a system restart. plus i couldnt find the menu… i know dmenu is there in some form but ill be darned if i could get it to work
If F11 isn’t working for full screen you can use $mod (win key)+F instead. EndeavourOS i3 also has rofi menu installed which can be accessed via the F9 key. A full listing of the keyboard shortcuts can be accessed via $mod+F1 or clicking the keyboard icon on the lower right in the i3 bar tray. Lastly, $mod+c should close any focused window.
ty ty
The question is, why do you bring such problems into your house?
Why do you need 4 distributions?
If it is about testing something, install 1 distribution natively, in it a virtualization solution like VirtualBox and there as many VMs as you need!
no that really isnt the question, the question is in the op really.
I have 3 separate installs on different drives. I share not!
What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to quadruple boot Manjaro, Arch, Endeavour and Artix. They are so similar, I see no practical benefit to doing that.
I usually stick to one OS per machine.
I’m guilty…i have three EndeavourOS on mine with different desktops on different drives.
Desktop Hopper! 
I’m in a lot worse shape than that! 3xEndeavourOS, 3x Arch, 3x other Arch based, Xubuntu, Rolling Rhino and MX-19! No - I wouldn’t do it without rEFInd Oh - and all on the same data, but different /home for each…
Well, then you have to live with problems of your own making.
By the way, I don’t understand why you put this in the lounge. Wrong subforum.
@Kresimir, their big secret.