Can 32- and 64-bit OS Share Same /home Partition?
 

I am pretty much a newbie with Linux and am just curious to know this:

Suppose I have already installed a 64-bit Linux OS and created two partitions: / and /home. The filesystem is EXT4.

If I thereafter install the same OS version (32-bit and on a different / partition, of course), can the 32- and 64-bit versions share the same /home partition?

I don't see why not, but I also don't see the point. Any decent 64-bit distro is going to be multi-lib capable, which means you could just use the one 64-bit system to do all of your 64 and 32-bit work.

Well, I think that Slackware is an exception to what you are saying. I could be wrong, of course...

I don't see any reason why you can't. The /home directory doesn't have any 32-bit or 64-bit features, nothing to identify it as such or prevent you from mounting it or using it, heck even in Windoze with the right drivers.

I have already installed the 64-bit OS version and configured such programs as Firefox and Thunderbird to my liking. If I understand you correctly, if and when I install the 32-bit OS version --without deleting/overwriting the 64-bit / partition and using the same /home partition--, my customizations for Firefox and Thunderbird would be also available under the 32-bit version. Correct?

Slackware is fully multilib enabled and could even be better than most distro's in that regard due to its lack of dependency resolution in the default package manager (my multilib Debian system can be a pain when the 32 and 64 bit libraries are out of sync and the package manager wants to remove the 32 bit versions).
A link to take a look at:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/
I can't think of any reasons to dual boot rather than just use multilib though I am sure there are some I would expect them to be rare cases.

They should be. I don't think there are configuration differences between 32-bit and 64-bit at least for these programs.

I've set up multi-lib on Salix before. While maintenance was a bit more of a pain than on other distros (package manager kept wanting to delete the 32-bit libs), it was able to handle it just fine.