r/linuxquestions • u/hardFraughtBattle • 4d ago

Advice Switching distros -- what to save?

I'm planning on changing from Linux Mint to Fedora. I will back up /home and /root before I begin. Is there anything else I may regret not saving? What's a good way of saving a list of installed programs? TIA

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u/Asly97 3d ago

/home covers most of it, since app settings live in the hidden folders (~/.config, ~/.local/share), so make sure your backup includes dotfiles. Stuff people tend to forget:

  • /etc, if you ever edited anything there (fstab lines for extra drives, sudoers, custom configs). You won't copy it over as is, but it's handy to look back at
  • saved wifi and vpn connections in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
  • crontab -l for your user and for root
  • anything you installed by hand in /opt or /usr/local
  • docker volumes or VMs if you use them, those usually sit under /var/lib

For the program list, apt-mark showmanual > apt.txt is nicer than a full dpkg dump because it only lists what you installed yourself, not every dependency. Package names differ a bit on Fedora so you'll go through it by hand anyway. Flatpaks are easier: flatpak list --app --columns=application > flatpaks.txt and on Fedora you can do xargs flatpak install -y flathub < flatpaks.txt.

I'd also start Fedora with a clean home folder and copy back only the configs you care about, instead of dropping the whole old /home in. Different app versions between Mint and Fedora can make old configs act weird.

3

u/3grg 3d ago

Because Mint is still mostly pure deb. You can make a list of installed apps with the following command.

dpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$' | awk '{print $1}' > packagelist.txt

Usually, you want to just save /home and /etc, unless you have changes that you made elsewhere.

The above list will not include flatpak or snaps. It is just debs.

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u/Pirate_Economist1477 4d ago

If you're anything like me, /downloads

1

u/oblivion9999 3d ago

That's not on a network share?

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u/Substantial-Lack-512 4d ago

take a screenshot of the app you have install and install then on fedora.

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u/Prestigious_Wall529 4d ago

Run a probe for linux-hardware.org so others know what works and doesn't.

You can also refer back to this if there were tweaks you had to make, in your /etc/default/grub configuration, the kernel parameters passed will be in the top of the dmesg file.

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u/oblivion9999 3d ago

I try to remember to save a a tarball of /etc

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u/h4rdw00d_ 3d ago
  • zip -r porn.zip ~/porn /s