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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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[Beginner] Importing /home from different Distro (Manjaro to Pop_OS) (feddit.it)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I had a dual boot I rarely used because reasons, one of them being that it was Manjaro and it kinda sort of borked itself and evey time I upgraded it asked me to make choices I had no idea what they meant.

I wanted to give Pop_OS a try so I went and nuked the Manjaro and set up the boot, root and swap of Pop_OS in its place.

Point is, I had the /home of Manjaro on a different location (The OS is on a SSD shared with windows and I put /home on a HD). I did not point Pop_OS to it at setup for fear of it being nuked (Will it nuke it? If not I guess I can do a new install and point it there?)

Can I link Pop_OS home to the old Manjaro home or do I need to take care of something (format it, remove some specific folder...).

I ask because I convinced myself the matter was trivial, but in the process of making sure the /home of Pop_OS was empty I ended up with a system hang and my passwords (both user AND root) being rejected and I had to reinstall the whole thing, so maybe there's more to /home than just a bunch of data?

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Should be "trivial", yes. The central OS components (e.g. systemd or whatever) shouldn't care about anything in your home directories. Only apps that store your user preferences, user DBs, etc. there should. So you might have some old hidden directories that won't be used anymore, some that hopefully different versions of the same apps if applicable can migrate the data from, etc. But it shouldn't affect the general functioning of your OS.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to first 1. backup the home directory, in case any app data migrations mess things up somehow, and 2. create a user with a home directory path that didn't exist in the old dir structure, in case you need to login as that user to fix things (e.g. let's say your profile or shell resource script has something that a new shell version in the new distro doesn't understand and that keeps you from logging in).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the detailed answer!

My user in Pop_OS is named differently than it was in Manjaro, does that mean my user will not "see" the stuff from Manjaro when I mount /home?

That could actually be desirable since I'd like to start from a clean state, but without losing my data...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

By default, your home directory will be /home/{username}, so your new user will not have any of the data from that other if they are named differently. It is possible to change the location of your home directory. Or to rename the subdirectory within /home at the filesystem level, of course. You could also go through your hidden directories and rename stuff so apps just don't find their old data directories, before you mount the directory on /home or before you start the apps to which the data belongs.