Can I preserve /home installing LL over another XFCE distro (Manjaro)?

[gold_finger]

I'm not trying to complicate things and am not suggesting that the following is "better" than what you already have planned; but there is another option you may want to consider.

If you have enough extra space on the hard drive you could triple boot with Windows, Manjero and Linux Lite.  In that case you could also make a completely separate partition to hold common data files (Docs, Music, Pics, etc.) and have them accessible to all OS's.

If you're interested in doing that, here are some general pointers:

• Make a Win 7 recovery dvd/usb if you don't already have one.
  
• Make external backup copies of important data files on Windows and Manjero.
  
• Use GParted from live LL dvd/usb to shrink Manjero's home as much as possible; then make a data partition at end of the disk.  (If planning to share files between only Linuxes, use Ext4 formatting.  If plan to share with Windows too, format it as NTFS.)
  
• Boot into Manjero and move your data files from home to the data partition.  (Keep config files in home where they are.)  If run into permission problems trying to do that, just go ahead an follow tutorial referenced in last step to set-up use of the data partition in Manjero now instead of doing so after LL installation.
  
• Boot into Windows and move any files you want from there to the data partition.
  
• Boot again with live LL dvd/usb and open GParted again.
  
• With data files removed from Manjero's home, you can now shrink it down to 2-3GB (which will be more than enough to hold the config files and your "Desktop" folder assuming you kept that on home.)
  
• Adjust sizes of Manjero home and data partition to leave 20-25GB free space for LL.
  
• In free space, make LL root partition (approx 20GB) and small home partition (2-3GB) for config files if you think you'd like to have option to keep those upon upgrades/re-installations.
  
• Run installer and use "Something else" option to direct installation to those new LL partitions.
  
• For "Device for boot loader installation" -- make sure you pick mbr of drive (probably /dev/sda) and not LL's root partition.  (Only exception to that is if you're using EasyBCD from Windows for booting.)
  
• After install is done and you've rebooted into it, follow steps in this tutorial to have the data partition auto-mounted at startup and to symlink the data folders there to your home.  Same basic steps shown can be used in Manjero.
  

Additional note of caution:  If you feel need to shrink any Windows partitions to make room for any of the above, that is best done from within Windows disk manager or by using a Windows-based tool like MiniTool Partition Wizard.  (GParted can be used, but doing so from Windows is safer and less likely to cause file corruption problems.)