Migrating data and settings between distros or machines
 

Currently I'm in a situation where I have Fedora Core 2 installed on an older machine of mine and I've spent quite a bit of time configuring things how I like them mostly through GUI utlities but some through direct config file manipulation. Now I want to move to Gentoo but I would like to keep my KDE configuration, Favorites for Mozilla/Firefox/Konquerer, user accounts, data, and possibly some applications and settings for these applications. So I guess my question is, is there a good way of migrating these types of things between distros or even between different machines?

I'm wondering if it would be as easy as copying a few directories over. If so however I don't know any easy way to get rid of the stuff I don't need (ex. application configurations I don't plan on using in gentoo) without analyzing each file that I copy over.

On another note I would also like to make some of these settings shared if possible in the future so that all my Linux boxes are using the same information such as favorites or preferences I guess sort of like a Domain environment with Windows servers.

I'm really hoping that this is easier on Linux than Windows because the nature of the tangled file system structure of Windows is one reason why I've been atempting to switch over. Thanks in advanced to anyone who can give me some insight.