tkn

Definitely take your time and soak up more info from other sources :) I hope all of this turns out to be at least marginally helpful :D

If you don't encrypt the drive, yes. Some things you will have to reauthenticate, however, like your online accounts, but when those are reconnected everything should work as intended. That you should confirm, however. I don't encrypt, though I should ;)

I'm utterly useless with base arch 🤣 If it works for you, who'm I to complain 👍

I guess I should have made that clear. Your /home directory is where everything user-related is stored in invisible folders. All your settings for the OS and applications are kept in there. So, if you copy that directory and restore it to a fresh install of the same distro, all of your settings will be restored. It's been years, but I've done it a few times.

The only thing you'll really need to do after that is re-install all of the apps you installed. Once you have, however, every apps settings are restored.

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

~/boot is at the root of the drive. Your home folder should be in ~/home/username. THAT you can copy wholesale. I believe. Don't take my word for it. Deja Dup can do it for you, as well, or the entire system.

So is this possible? and if yes, how should I go about this? did someone make a tool for this already? Or(!) can I burn it to a flash and the drivers will correct themselves/I’ll deal with them later?

I think this is where a few respondents got the impression you are looking at this like a Windows install. It is not. All of the drivers, minus proprietary (also called non-free) drivers (i.e., Nvidia, file format support, etc), are already included in the installation. On laptops, this can get weird with some of the laptop-specific hardware, but most of it works out of the box most of the time. Exceptions are old WinTel-era wireless and networking cards which needed a terrible driver wrapper, but has long since fallen out of favor. Thankfully!

I'm not an expert in Linux, but I've been using it for more than 20 years. I used to be plagued by this issue, but since online services have matured, I've got most of my stuff synced up. That, and my NAS and an external drive for backups. I do have a few thoughts, though.

One, I believe you can simply copy your /home directory and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install. This strikes me as a limiting option, as it doesn't allow you to distro hop, at least not seamlessly. Also, get an external drive for backups. I use Deja Dup for simple, easy backups and restorations.

Two, I would suggest you investigate either Fedora (https://getfedora.org) or Pop_OS! (https://pop.system76.com/) as an alternative. Fedora is based on Red Hat, which is very mature, but strikes a nice balance between the latest software and reliability. Pop_OS! is Debian-based, which is also a very well matured OS, though System76 has made some major improvements. I use their Pop Shell extension for GNOME on Fedora 39 for window tiling, easily the best I've used on any Linux distro. Regardless, almost any other distro should be easier to get going over Arch. Sorry, Arch users ;)

Three, if you really don't want to leave Arch, check out Manjaro. It's Arch-based, but it's quite a bit easier to set up.

Four, if you'd still like to try borking things, but without facing consequences, I'd set up a local VM using Boxes for GNOME or VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). That way you can test stuff without risking your functional system. Boxes is better, IMO, since it can install distros from the app itself. The list has at least 100 distros of all types to choose from, including Haiku and FreeBSD. It would be good, however, if you have at least 16GBs of RAM, though I generally run VMs with 4GBs of RAM, Linux can run fine with 2GBs.

I hope that helps :)

Aha! I figured it out. Comments are sequestered to the instance the user is commenting from. Federation :)

Thanks and sorry! I'm getting it fixed now :D

Sorry about that! My first time with Lemmy :D

Ah! Thanks!! I'll update the post.

Hmm. I can't see any comments, though I seem to be able to comment myself.