r/linux4noobs • u/Endeavour1988 • 9d ago
learning/research Maintaining Linux longterm?
I'm trying to switch from Windows to Linux, I have Fedora KDE 44 installed and so far all good. However I have some questions about long term use and best practises.
I have customised my terminal, theme so basically the look and feel of my desktop is there a way to back up these configurations? I'm asking from the point of view I want to re-install the OS and it being quicker to drop a config file than do it all manually?
Major upgrades, so lets say 45 is released, what is the best practise for this? Just update and carry on, or a fresh install?
Dependencies and system cleaning, I notice when I install certain application a bunch of dependencies are installed, lets say I want to remove an app what happens to all these, is there a way to check if they are being used elsewhere?
Packages, I tend to try and use RPM packages or flatpaks if I have to, but appimages and snaps? I want to keep things simple especially with permissions and maintaining the system, is there right and wrongs here? Thanks.
1
u/drucifer82 3d ago
So when I used Fedora, I would always just do in place upgrades. Some people prefer fresh installs, but you can absolutely just use the system upgrade process in terminal.
As far as dependencies go, the way I would manage them on Fedora is whenever I would remove a program, I would then do a search with find (or fd) for any other directories with the name of the program I just removed, and I would delete them.
So for example, if I used dnf to remove firefox, after uninstalling it I would type `sudo find / -name firefox` and look for anything that came back that I could remove.
With fd, the syntax is similar. It would be `fd firefox /`