Are there drawbacks from copying my home folder from one machine to another?
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Are there drawbacks from copying my home folder from one machine to another?
I am in the process of building up another laptop with slackware, but I dont want to create my home folder structure again. Would there be any issue if I copy my current home folder to the new installation?
Nope - I keep a copy of my /home directory on my nas for backup purposes. If something bad happens, I just copy it back. The only caveat would be if you are starting any apps from .xinitrc (or however that is done in slack), you will need to have those installed on the target machine or they won't start obviously.
Usually nothing serious, provided the installs are similar. You have configuration stuff in /home, and if one has gnome and the other kde, there will be bilge there. It depends on if you're able to isolate and sort out the bits that don't match. I did it with slackware without any real issues
If your installs are chalk & cheese, better to copy the visible stuff only.
Sounds good. I thought it would be ok, but I wanted to get some feedback. Since the new machine will pretty much have the same apps installed it should make it a quicker ramp up.
If you have a ~/bin/ where you keep compiled executables, they might or might not work on the new system, and you might want to omit application-specific cache directories (many use ~/.cache/) but other than that it should be fine. I've been copying my old home directory forward to new systems for about fifteen years.
Copied from my desktop to a laptop, went very smoothly. I got some errors related to it wanting to start programs that still needed to be installed but it cleared up after installing them.
Copied from my desktop to a laptop, went very smoothly.
For most folks that will be the case. Just a caveat for future readers of this thread, if the UID/GID are different be sure to update the copied files before logging in as that user. Basically chown -R user:group /home/user.
For most folks that will be the case. Just a caveat for future readers of this thread, if the UID/GID are different be sure to update the copied files before logging in as that user. Basically chown -R user:group /home/user.
Oh yes I forgot. On the destination computer I did the copy as root before creating the user account for it. It gave a message about the existing home folder and updating permissions iirc, I said yes and it did so without issue.
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Just a caveat for future readers of this thread, if the UID/GID are different be sure to update the copied files before logging in as that user. Basically chown -R user:group /home/user.
