Have you ever re-installed your OS? Often that means setting up preferences again for all your applications, getting that look and feel back that you like, copying a bunch of files around. It is annoying and can take days! With Linux you don't ever have to deal with this if you know a simple trick. This probably doesn't come as a surprise to many Linux users, but it might to the newbies. The trick is to put your /home directory in a separate partition or even on a separate disk. I haven't had to setup any of my preferences for any of my applications in years, even across multiple Linux Distributions.
Here is an example of how awesome that is. Earlier this week I had a hard disk fail and it took my OS with it. Fortunately, I had my /home directory on a separate hard disk. I reinstalled my OS on an empty partition on the disk and pointed /home at my old /home partition and I was back up and running as if nothing had happened in half an hour. All my old preferences and files were there. My desktop was just as messy as it ever was! Home sweet home.
I'm not going to get into the details of how to partition a disk, but a hint is to go to the "manual partitioning" step on installation. I usually have 3 partitions: /,/home and a swap partition. Ping me if you need more info than that.
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