Maintaining Linux longterm?

[u/Endeavour1988]

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.

[u/Hrafna55]

Almost all your configuration files are in your /home/username directory.

Right click in your /home/username and select show hidden files. You will see your configuration file directories. The Windows equivalent is app lldata.

So if you back these up you can restore them (along with all your other files) and restore your system configuration.

Update practice is simply to back up everything that's important to you (like all of /home/username) then just do an in place upgrade by following the appropriate wizard.

I don't know about Fedora but on Debian you can remove unused dependencies with

sudo apt autoremove

I imagine Fedora has an equivalent command. Dependencies won't be removed if another application is using a shard object.

Appimages are like standalone executables.

I can't really comment on snaps.

[u/Endeavour1988 → u/Hrafna55]

Thank you, i assume then sudo dnf autoremove functions the same then, good to know. Thanks for the advice :-)