I'm distro shopping right now, so I made a large "home" partition, and several smaller OS partitions (GPT FTW!). If I want things to "sync" (Docs, Downloads, .mozilla, .bashrc) I delete the /home/user/Music and symlink it to my /mnt/sharehome/Music .
I installed ubuntu on my workstation in 2013 and have upgraded the OS since. I've swapped out the motherboard and added 5 drives in raid6. The thing morphed from a desktop into a server over the years. The only original HW is the case (power supply died a few years ago). I never really concidered wiping & installing a new OS.