I finally switched from openSUSE to Manjaro last night. Adapting the home directory required jumping through a few loops but in the end I got it done. There are only a few things to be aware of; If anyone else plans on changing distributions and doesn’t want to start from scratch, here’s what you should pay attention to in order to port your data successfully:
- The one annoying part is Firefox and Thunderbird choosing to drop profiles from other installations by default, due to Mozilla designing them this way: When first starting up they will warn that your existing data can’t be ported from different versions of the product. Obviously it can; You just need to go to ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird and edit installs.ini and profiles.ini to make the new installation UID point to your old profile directory located there.
- Fonts use slightly different names between distributions: Even if you’re using the same font in the system or application settings, you may need to rename them in the config (eg: “Droid Sans” to “Droid Sans [1ASC]”). Luckily most applications will either know which font you’re referring to or fallback to the default font until you find and fix the definition.
- Permissions have to be updated on user files, such as to fix the group which defaults to 100 on openSUSE but is 1000 on Manjaro. You can easily do this with the command
chown -Rh username:username /home/username(-R to recurse, -h to include hidden content). - If you used custom user scripts they’re no longer located in ~/bin but ~/.local/bin, simply move the directory and your scripts will be detected system wide again.
- It’s a good idea to delete your ~/.cache directory at this point. Make sure you don’t have shortcuts that were rendered invalid in ~/.local/share/applications. Also if your DE is KDE, run the command “kbuildsycoca5” just to be sure everything is properly adapted.