can i preserve my /home partition if i change into a new distro?
 

Hello,

Basically the title of the thread says it all. Im planning to change distro, from slack to debian. will i be able to reuse my slack /home partition in debian? so i wouldnt have to backup a lot of files.

Thank you for your time,
Mikel

In theory, as long as you use the same file system, there should be no problem in reusing your /home on debian. Now with that said, I would still do a backup of anything you can't lose, because sometimes theory doesn't match reality.

This can be tricky in that your home directory has a lot of hidden files in it that are application specific.

I'd recommend, installing your new distribution on a new drive. Let it make a new home for you. Then after that's working fine, get your old drive mounted under a directory in your home account.

Hello,

Hahaha... OK. Thanks for the advice.

Thank you for your time,

Mikel

To be honest, those files are one of the main reasons why you would want to preserve your /home. Most of them are configuration files for apps, and by moving them to a new distro, those apps will retain the customizations that you've done on the old distro. I don't know about you, but not being able to preserve stuff like that is one of my main beefs with Windows.

And if the app isn't on the new distro, the hidden files don't do anything other than take up disk space.

Maybe this has more to do with being in control and not ending up with something that works in a flaky manner. But since you'll be getting a new set of hidden files for the new versions of software, wouldn't it make sense to bring up the applications in the new home and then merge your old home settings into the configs for the new home. Application versions will be different from distro to distro. I'd rather be in control of it and not make some leap of faith that every single program setting is going to be forward or backward compatible from the last version.

I agree with your windows comments. But having the configurations in files and not the registry is the key to being able to port the settings.

Problem that might occure is user IDs and group IDs