I’m on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I’m content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    40·
    8 days ago

    You can backup you home-directory and add it back into the newly installed OS. Some of the more dedicated distro-hoppers will even have the home-directory on a separate partition, which they don’t overwrite during installation and rather just mount into the new OS.

    The home-directory contains all your music, pictures, add-ons and portable software. It also contains your configurations under ~/.config/ and local files of applications under ~/.local/.
    After you’ve reinstalled, you won’t have all the same applications installed, but once you reinstall them, they should pick up the configuration from those folders and work as you expect. Sometimes, your new distribution/installation might use different versions of that particular software, so it’s not guaranteed that everything works perfectly, but it does work pretty well.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      271·
      8 days ago

      I’d go 1 step further and insist on putting home on a separate partition anyway - helps with issues like running out of diskspace.

      To answer the original question, boot the distro’s ISO from a USB stick and try that (/those) before you actually install anything. You might find some hardware’s not supported (ie wifi) until you do a full install, but at least you can eliminate the distros you don’t like, quickly.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        7 days ago

        Or 1 step even further and use a btrfs partition with subvolumes for root, home, etc. Then you’re not even stuck with a specific amount of disk space for each. (But you may be limited depending on the specific distro installer support for btrfs. In theory you can always just mount the subvols yourself and point the installer at them, but YMMV).

        I recommend keeping a separate boot partition though.

      • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 days ago

        Not sure but it seems to me most major distributions offer you to do a separate /home partition by default? I may be wrong but this happens with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu? Or at least they do recommend to make it that way

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 days ago

          It might have to do with my being an old fart, but having at least home on a separate disk or partition seems like basic stuff. I’ve always done it that way.

          Of course back in the day, everything had its own partition.

          • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            Yeah, I like /var to be in it’s own partition so I can keep my system(s) under close control, and a separate /boot seems to be necessary these *EFI days