Hey guys my Fedora install has been giving me trouble lately, and now refuses to boot at all. For a while mullvad and firewalld refused to start on occasion so I just started manually checking at boot and starting them when need be, but now hostname.service fails and the other two fail, and the system gets hung up on some gnome doohicky and refuses to go past it to boot. Yesterday it wouldn’t let me update because pipewire i686 (or is it i868? Anyway…) and gnu-utils (or something) i688668 (still can’t remember the numbers) kept causing conflicts with the x86_64 versions, and the advice was to uninstall the non-x86_64 versions, but when I tried to uninstall it told me they weren’t installed to begin with.
Frankly I’m sick of it, so I’m gonna do a fresh install I guess. This brings us to my question. Currently just transferring my entire /home/ to a drive, then gonna transfer it to the new install. What, outside of that directory, should I also bring for ease of setting up the new system? And what should I specifically exclude, especially anything which would cause issues or conflicts that is in the /home/ dir? Finally, I had a bunch of what appeared to be bash related temporary garbage files, all I really need to bring from bash is .bashrc, right? The rest of those can get trashed? I should add, I’m likely just going to go with fedora again, though I am considering debian.
Thanks for your help in advance. Didn’t see my day being this but I guess it’s what I’m doing.
Honestly I would say just grab your dotfiles and personal files. For your .bashrc and .bash_profile files, you can bring them if you want but make sure to just merge the important things into the versions your new distro creates. Also look in your /etc/environment file in case you set any variables there
I’m a bit new, when you say dotfiles you mean your .config, .local, .vim, et cetera directories, right? Seen that phrase around and sorta just figured that’s what it means but right now it pays to verify lol.
Primarily .config and .vim (if you use neovim or other vim versions then your config will be in .config already, I use neovim). When people say dotfiles they mostly mean .config since that’s stuff that you edit and customize to your system. Most other directories can be ignored when migrating to a new system, I personally just move my .config, docker directory, and calibre library if I’m hopping distros
For the future, if you make your home a separate partition, you can easily reinstall your system without wiping your home next time you get a broken system.