Hi, Linux! I’ve been using Linux for many years now, but haven’t moved distros in awhile. I’m considering it now, and I really would like to migrate over all my customized system and software settings. So far, I am thinking of backing up everything that begins with a dot in my home folder, all of my systemd service files, and user/root crontabs. I know this is missing some things, but I’m not sure what. Any advice/warnings/examples people care to share?
You could start by having /home on a different partition. So that you simply can mount it in your new system and have the same settings and files as previously.
This would be a big help, and I used to do that. I’ve actually heard that this can cause some problems between distros though.
It shouldn’t as long as you make sure that the numeric uid/gid of your user account matches the one from the original system. If that’s not feasible then you can
chownthe tree.Hmm, this is actually something I will be fixing from the last time I repurposed this PC. What exactly do you mean chown the tree? I know what chown is, but what does tree mean in this context?
tree in this context would mean the whole directory, its files and its subdirectories. Like the whole Directory Tree.
Like ‘/’ or ‘/home/electric_nan’?
My biggest problem with it is forgetting which system I booted into when I use the same desktop environments :P and yeah configs can get out of date and inconsistent but I usually just blow them away since I’m not into customizing my desktop much