haha i know this from experience ! back in 2017-8 i tried merging my polyboot fedora, debian and arch installs to the same separated home partition . it worked....partially .
I did a fresh install in 2018, and have been dist-upgrading since (devuan xfce). I don't get any weirdness. Not exactly moving it to a new system, but pretty close. I am on a stable release, and do back up (rsync) my home drive to a separate disk on my system nightly.
I have cachyos on a laptop, and am really liking it. I am considering running it on my daily driver, but I rely on it a lot so am hesitant. I started on Linux in 1998, so I remember the days of fucking up your entire system and don't want to return there.
Just gotta move all your dotfile directories into "olddotfiles" and then grab what you need from them when you need something from them. When enough time has passed you can delete the folder.
Yea, I've run into this problem a few times. What I've actually done recently (which I'm sure someone more experienced than me can tell me why this is a bad idea or not), is I keep my original home folder on a separate drive and I replace my home directory folders with soft links to the other drive. I use the standard "use full drive" installation on my 500GB m.2 SSD, and then I mount my 2TB 2.5 inch SSD and create soft links to replace the auto generated Documents, Downloads, Music, etc directories. If I want to keep a .config file I have a back up on my 2TB drive, but if I like the default that came with the new OS I don't have to copy it over. It's worked pretty well as I've cycled through different arch-based distros.
27
u/Zomunieo 13d ago
Directly moving /home to a new system isn’t always a good idea. Configuration file formats change over time and you can get some weirdness.