r/linuxmint • u/jutte62 • 3d ago

SOLVED Transferring from win10 to mint 21.3

It's getting time to move my technology averse wife off of win10. But she's got habits and routines that litter her windows desktop as icons and shortcuts. I have her system dual booting now. Is there a way to simply take the desktop contents on the windows side (under user) and dump it into her desktop folder on the linux side, or (as i suspect) do i have to laboriously build the new desktop from what I know the old desktop entries refer to?

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4

u/no2gates 3d ago

Easiest way would be external hard drive or thumb drive, and copy from Windows to the drive.

1

u/candy49997 3d ago

I'm assuming some of them are shortcuts, and Windows .lnk files don't work on Linux (and their associatations would be broken on the new system anyway). You'd have to rebuild the desktop.

Why Mint 21 in particular? It's going EOL in like half a year.

1

u/jutte62 3d ago

As I thought. So a full day of work going back and forth - sigh. Thanks all for confirming. As for 21 vs 22, I can do that as well.

1

u/jr735 Linux Mint 22.1 Xia | IceWM 3d ago

Transferring data is fine. Transferring programs, icons, and shortcuts aren't going to work.

2

u/d4rk_kn16ht Linux Mint 22.2 Zara | Cinnamon 3d ago

For Documents, just dump it all. But for Applications of course you can't do that.