Not too hard, especially if you plan on running the same software on your new distro. Basically, all of the settings are in your home directory (/home/[username]/), so you could just copy everything from your home directory and that’s that.
Not only that, but you could also set up your home dir to be on another partition or drive. Basically, you don’t have to copy anything if you set up your distro like this. You just point the new distro to your former home directory, this is home now, and it’ll just use all of the settings from there. Sure, some settings and files are distro specific, but you can manually delete those if you want to free up a few MB of space.
How easy is it to move user data and software to another distro if I decide to change it up?
Not too hard, especially if you plan on running the same software on your new distro. Basically, all of the settings are in your home directory (/home/[username]/), so you could just copy everything from your home directory and that’s that.
Not only that, but you could also set up your home dir to be on another partition or drive. Basically, you don’t have to copy anything if you set up your distro like this. You just point the new distro to your former home directory, this is home now, and it’ll just use all of the settings from there. Sure, some settings and files are distro specific, but you can manually delete those if you want to free up a few MB of space.