Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.

I don’t like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.

My plan is simple:

  1. I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I’m going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
  2. I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
  3. I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don’t think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I’ll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I’ll have to use an RPM package.

Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?

And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn’t count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 year ago

    I want to write a script for this app config backup stuff once. Also working on Windows, but maan I have low motivation on that one haha.

    You can use your configs, relevant for me are

    • firefox: ~/.mozilla/firefox can stay if you keep using Fedora Firefox
    • thunderbird ~/.thunderbird/ copied to ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird
    • libreoffice from somewhere to the flatpak directory (useful if you have a custom dictionary, autocompletions or interface)
    • qgis, element

    Many other apps use the same structure with a profile folder so easily transferrable.

    In firefox and thunderbird you either delete the whole contents and replace everything, or you only paste the contents of your *-default-release folder in the new default release folder, after deleting its contents.

    Flatpak apps need to be ran once, to create the ~/.var/app/ subfolder. After that you can close them and replace everything. If you delete that folder, or move it somewhere as a backup, the settings are reset to default. Pretty cool.

    If you want to try the new image-based distro model, I can highly recommend ublue and their installer. It has all the codecs out of the box and also an nvidia version which will never break basically, if it should, you can roll back to your previous system that worked.

    It is a very cool distro model, and ublue has loots of customizations. If you never tried KDE I recommend their kinoite-main (do not use any -nokmods, these images are outdated as they removed kmods from -main !)