When moving home to new install

Home as in /home/user
I usually copy the whole shebang elsewhere, then copy most of the stuff back.
As different distros use different DE’s, would there be any conflicts?
For example moving from Gnome 2 (Ubuntu Mate) to Gnome 3?
I presume other DE/WM’s would just ignore files they don’t use?

Obviously I am probably confusing DE and WM :man_shrugging:
But perhaps I shouldn’t worry, and just copy the whole lot, and let the system sort itself out, but am a little unsure if any of the dot files may cause an issue, so I’ve been picking certain folders to move (like.mozilla, .chromium etc) and leaving the rest in backup

Copying the files works for the most part. Occasional incompatibilities between versions do exist, but sorting them out is much faster than having to reconfigure everything. Worst case you can remove the files again and start anew. Just make sure to keep a copy until you are sure everything works.

Ideally you’d make /home a separate partition alltogether. That way you don’t even have to copy files between installations and can even run multiple Linux distributions with the same settings/files.

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Thanks, so basically I should stop worrying and get on with it…

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