Question: I’m running Linux Mint right now. Is it possible to change distro to … for example OpenSuse - without a clean install ?
The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.
If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.
And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?
There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.
Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.
There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.
This is probably the reason why most distros will have the home directory on a separate partition. To easily allow you to keep your most important data when reinstalling or switching to a new distro.
Theoretically yes, practically no.
+1 for openSUSE btw.
THANK YOU ALL for your replies. I’ll do a clean install and made a backup of my files (was not difficult bc most stuff I have in the cloud). I’m moving indeed from Mint to OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I don’t know exactely why, but it seems to me an interesting thing to do. Still figuring out what distro fits me best.
A useful setup for the future is to keep home as a separate partition. Then you should be able to reinstall a different distro on the root partition and have all the data carried over. There is some bleed over in that all your dotfiles will carry over, but usually that doesn’t break anything and is usually a plus (e.g. all your firefox addons and preferences will immediately be applied in the new install)
This… This is a just good practice. That way you can go buck wild on your home partition. Additionally, you’ll never accidentally have to deal with booting into your system with 0 free space on root. It’s an easy fix but why have to deal with it
Excellent choice. I did the same last year. I’m still on Tumbleweed.
No, the package systems, management tools, and configs for Debian (what Mint uses) and OpenSUSE are different. Technically, if you had tons of time and a solid understanding of Linux inside and out, you might be able to pull it off, but it’s not worth the hassle at all.
Technically, if you had tons of time and a solid understanding of Linux inside and out, you might be able to pull it off, but it’s not worth the hassle at all.
This is what I thought. Preferably “from the outside” i.e. while the system isn’t running. But all you “saved” in the end is the filesystem the original OS was installed on, and possibly personal data (which probably is the reason OP is even asking).
I’ve read some stories of someone transmuting Ubuntu into Debian or something like that. It requires lots of knowledge of both systems, plenty of time, and infinite patience. The two distributions should be somewhat closely related in order to make this gargantuan project even remotely feasible. If you’re jumping from Arch to Gentoo, you might as well just do LFS while you’re at it.
I believe you can install the Arch package manager on gentoo
Oh, that’s a good start. At least one corner stone can be placed easily. The rest of the journey won’t be that easy though.
From very stable and boring distro to rolling release distro is good experiment. Rivals to your future choice are Manjaro, Arch, maybe Fedora. Are you certain about the SuSE? 😉
Somebody the other day asked what the point of the immutable desktops are. Well, ostree can do this. Granted, you have to stay within the ostree ecosystem. However, you can rebase from one ostree distro to another.
What made you want to make the switch? I’m currently on Mint
I’m still in the fase of exploration. When using Windows, you just have 1 choice. I just want to discover what suits me best. So nothing against Linux Mint. It’s great, but maybe OpenSuse is better for me? I don’t know.
just in case you dont know, Distrosea lets you try various distros online which is handy just for getting a quick idea what the UI is like
for trying out different distros using the live USB method, Ventoy is a good option since it lets you have multiple ISO files on your USB drive at once, instead of having to reformat your USB each time
Just boot to a USB for a low-risk test.
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Personally I don’t use a separate
/homepartition. Software versions can differ significantly between distros and this has plenty of potential to effectively fuck up your system anyhow*.I use a separate data partition instead, and hook it into my home with symlinks. Pictures, Documents, Videos etc. - these are usually those that take the most disk space anyhow, by a large margin.
