Today I have something very exciting to share: the Alpha release of KDE Linux, KDE’s new operating system! Many of you may be familiar with KDE Linux already through Harald Sitter’s 202…
what’s the most efficient way of backing everything up and moving across to a distro that’s more actively maintained?
Honestly, don’t migrate everything. Things can break when moving configuration files between distributions and you’d end up having more work than backing up the necessities (user files) and doing the rest from scratch. User IDs in the file metadata are the first thing to mismatch and things could spiral down from there (looking for files in one place but the new distribution places it somewhere else, for example).
Get an external hard disk, format it as ExFAT and copy documents, videos, downloads,… from your home directory onto it. ExFAT does not support Linux file permissions, so from your new distribution you can copy the files without any “permission denied” errors.
Sadly Ubuntu and its derivatives such as Neon are still often recommended to newcomers for historical reasons even though there are more stable and easier distributions around. Ubuntu fucking up Flatpak compatibility in its latest release is just another chapter in an endless saga. Fedora KDE should offer a good balance between long term availability, recent KDE software and stability. Personally, I’m more of an openSUSE guy myself but some quirks may be a bit much for newcomers.
Honestly, don’t migrate everything. Things can break when moving configuration files between distributions and you’d end up having more work than backing up the necessities (user files) and doing the rest from scratch. User IDs in the file metadata are the first thing to mismatch and things could spiral down from there (looking for files in one place but the new distribution places it somewhere else, for example).
Get an external hard disk, format it as ExFAT and copy documents, videos, downloads,… from your home directory onto it. ExFAT does not support Linux file permissions, so from your new distribution you can copy the files without any “permission denied” errors.
Sadly Ubuntu and its derivatives such as Neon are still often recommended to newcomers for historical reasons even though there are more stable and easier distributions around. Ubuntu fucking up Flatpak compatibility in its latest release is just another chapter in an endless saga. Fedora KDE should offer a good balance between long term availability, recent KDE software and stability. Personally, I’m more of an openSUSE guy myself but some quirks may be a bit much for newcomers.