I’m on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I’m content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?
By far the most important thing I’ve done is created a list of all the package names. With just one command, I can reinstall all my apps.
The second most important thing I’ve done is created a long list of gsettings/dconf commands that configure Gnome to my liking.
I’ve also moved most of my user data off my OS drive to removable drives. But I don’t have my home on a separate drive since I don’t want to share that across different distros since they configure things differently. It’s also just a lot easier to not have a separate home.
Apart from that, the script I have also copies over some config files, sets my hostname, sets flatpak overrides.