On 11/26/24 01:03, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > But there are no icons left on the desktop - no more Portal, and none of > the utilities I downloaded were on my $PATH. > > How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff that vanishes > when you do a fresh install? Are there some tricks I can use, rather > than painstakingly re-installing all my utilities one by one?
If they were installed through a package manager, you probably shouldn't do that. > I assume you can just copy the old /home over to the new drive Mind the dotfiles. Apps might behave strangely when you run them with an old config file. > But that does nothing about all the nifty utilities that > were in (e.g.) /usr/bin (even though the configuration files are probably > in /home). I hate losing stuff and drastic changes like that, so what I've done in the past when I used Ubuntu was: * do a complete backup * clean-install the latest *-LTS version * restore /home, being careful not to overwrite existing dotfiles * restore any other filesystems that aren't part of the base install * modify /etc/profile.d/* to change $PATH as appropriate * keep the installation as long as possible. The last time I went through this I made a list of installed packages (apt list --installed) so I could re-install (some of) them on the new OS. This probably is not the recommended procedure. Since I switched to Debian the issue hasn't come up, so I haven't yet been forced into a decision as to how to deal with it.
