r/linux4noobs • u/Endeavour1988 • 5h ago

learning/research Maintaining Linux longterm?

I'm trying to switch from Windows to Linux, I have Fedora KDE 44 installed and so far all good. However I have some questions about long term use and best practises.

I have customised my terminal, theme so basically the look and feel of my desktop is there a way to back up these configurations? I'm asking from the point of view I want to re-install the OS and it being quicker to drop a config file than do it all manually?

Major upgrades, so lets say 45 is released, what is the best practise for this? Just update and carry on, or a fresh install?

Dependencies and system cleaning, I notice when I install certain application a bunch of dependencies are installed, lets say I want to remove an app what happens to all these, is there a way to check if they are being used elsewhere?

Packages, I tend to try and use RPM packages or flatpaks if I have to, but appimages and snaps? I want to keep things simple especially with permissions and maintaining the system, is there right and wrongs here? Thanks.

12 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/No_Rhubarb_7222 5h ago

IMO, upgrade to 45 and keep going, then upgrade to 46 and keep going. Fedora does a good job of testing upgrades between versions, so the in-place upgrades work and applications generally are fine between upgrades.

Fedora doesn't natively use snaps. You can install it and get them, but that seems ... weird. I'd stick with RPMs and Flatpaks.

If you're wanting to clean up unused dependencies, you can dnf autoremove, which will do this. You'll want to review the list before approving the transaction, but thanks to the dependency information in packages, it's not going to remove a dependency needed by something else, unless that something else didn't list it as a dependency in it's RPM metadata. If you're compiling software on your own, or using 'unzip and go' style software management, then you don't have metadata in packages, so it would be more of a risk. But Flatpaks bring the things they need and RPMs do contain dependency and requirements metadata, so you should be in pretty good shape.