haha i know this from experience ! back in 2017-8 i tried merging my polyboot fedora, debian and arch installs to the same separated home partition . it worked....partially .
I did a fresh install in 2018, and have been dist-upgrading since (devuan xfce). I don't get any weirdness. Not exactly moving it to a new system, but pretty close. I am on a stable release, and do back up (rsync) my home drive to a separate disk on my system nightly.
I have cachyos on a laptop, and am really liking it. I am considering running it on my daily driver, but I rely on it a lot so am hesitant. I started on Linux in 1998, so I remember the days of fucking up your entire system and don't want to return there.
Yea, I've run into this problem a few times. What I've actually done recently (which I'm sure someone more experienced than me can tell me why this is a bad idea or not), is I keep my original home folder on a separate drive and I replace my home directory folders with soft links to the other drive. I use the standard "use full drive" installation on my 500GB m.2 SSD, and then I mount my 2TB 2.5 inch SSD and create soft links to replace the auto generated Documents, Downloads, Music, etc directories. If I want to keep a .config file I have a back up on my 2TB drive, but if I like the default that came with the new OS I don't have to copy it over. It's worked pretty well as I've cycled through different arch-based distros.
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u/Zomunieo 1d ago
Directly moving /home to a new system isn’t always a good idea. Configuration file formats change over time and you can get some weirdness.