do you know that minecraft mod that autosorts your inventory? is there are project that can autosort a messy file system and put all of your files of a similar nature into a well organised, well named order. obviously this would require ai that could do image, language, and audio recognition but is there anything in the works? i can imagine this would speed up distrohopping by 10x. ai powered file management
I am confusion. It seems like this wouldn’t help much with distro-hopping at all. At least not the way I learned to reinstall OSes, i.e. keep
/home
and make sure to back up important config files you edited.hi confusion
wait so how do you ‘keep home’, im confused explain your process
Typically you keep you /home on a separate drive or partition. Your /root and /swp are on others. When you install the new OS you do custom partitions and mount options install the OS on the root then mount /home to your home partition/drive.
You’ll still have to install the applications again, but all of your configs and history is still there. It feels surreal the first time you do it.
Would it be possible just to copy /home to a separate drive and then point a fresh install to that location?
This is actually a great idea but I didn’t separate my home when I installed my current distro
Yeah, you absolutely can mount a different path to /home with fstab after installation. How you decide to sort your files in /home (or have them sorted by automation) has zero influence on distro hopping.
Yes. If you copy
/home
to a completely different drive, do make sure to be intentional about access rights (i.e. in your new install, you want your files to belong to you again and you want scripts to still be executable; sorting this out after the fact is possible but can be time-consuming) and make sure to copy hidden files/directories (i.e..dotfiles
, which is where user preferences for your apps are stored; if you want e.g. your Firefox bookmarks and tabs to remain with you, keep these files).Yeah I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible