what is the best way? Just to install Manjaro and install the needed programs.
Or use flatpak or similar? What about the config files, can I use them just by import from the old system? There is no need to stop the old system/hardware and use the new one, I’ve to nearly 2 identical systems (hardware) to test it.
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yes - this
no need - but you can when you explicitly want to
have a backup of them and refer to it if you need to when setting up the new system
I would not recommend to just (re) use them.
Exceptions are ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird for Firefox and Thunderbird - same goes for Chrome at al configs, which re located in:
~/.config/... somewhere
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Step 1: Backup - I used Mint with Timeshift and Back-in-Time.
- Export a list of all installed packages to a text file for reference.
- Before installing Manjaro, I set Timeshift to store my snapshot on my mounted HDD. This means I could have reinstalled and restored Linux Mint in just a few minutes.
- I installed Manjaro Cinnamon edition first, and simply copied back my Cinnamon home directory from Back-in-Time.
- A week later, I installed Manjaro Plasma edition, and just imported various .config items as I reinstalled packages I wanted from my packagelist.
NB: It’s not a great plan to import everything ‘wholesale’, just settings for individual softwares as and when required… so if you used ‘variety wallpaper changer’ you’ll simply import ~/.config/variety. Same for Strawberry.
I used Gnome-Disks with Mint to mount my WD, and two toshiba drives as /mnt/(W2 T3 T4) so that all my config files (for example, qbittorrent) would work. qBittorrent started up on Plasma and was seeding my files from the first ten minutes.
Use MELD to compare and merge your old ZSH and BASH config files - don’t simply copy them in because Manjaro already has pretty nice configurations included OOTB.
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nemo actions, scripts
If you have customized it a lot, you may want to adjust this.
$HOME/.local/share/nemo
My recommendation basedon my own experience:
- Backup your system, especially /home where your config files live.
- Export a list of the programs you want / like / need and check if they are available as flatpaks and / or native packages - if possible, stay clear of AUR packages.
- Wipe the HDD and do a fresh install of Manjaro
- Install your programs of choice and use old config files only if you really tweaked the heck out of a specific program.
Carrying over old junk (i.e. config files) from a different system always bears the risk of breaking the new system - Mint is based on Ubuntu while Manjaro is based on Arch → there are some slight differences that can make a big difference.
Meld is a good graphical diff program so that you can easily compare and merge parts of your old config files into the current config files. IMHO that’s much safer.
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That’s the way I did it.
Of course, as I use seperate partitians for Root (/) and Home (/home), so mostly all I had to do was reinstall a bunch of applications.
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Thanks a lot to all the ideas, and I see to “reinstall a bunch of applications” is not the only hurdle; e.g. I want to use mutt (or neomutt) but using my old config files throw error messages. I suppose it awaits me some (or a bunch) of finetuning. But I want to change to a rolling release, and I hope it works for me and later I never again have to install a newer version of an OS.
Start afresh. Let bygones be bygones.
This is the reason I don’t use a separate /home directory, instead keeping it backed up so if I reinstalled I could manually copy only files that I want, monitoring for errors as I do so, and leaving behind any ‘fluff’ that accumulated… then after a month, just remove the backups from before the reinstall.