 Switching to a new Linux distribution is kind of like moving house you have to pack up all of your stuff from the old place and move it to the new one and There is a process that you kind of have to go through when you're switching to a new Linux distribution and If you don't really follow that process things can be a little bit messy It doesn't really necessarily mean that you're going to fail or that your new Linux distribution isn't going to be awesome It just kind of means that the process is going to be a little bit harder Then it maybe should be if you kind of follow the steps that you're supposed to do So what I thought I'd do today is talk about a few things that you kind of have to keep in mind or do In order to make the process of switching to from one Linux distribution to another as smooth as possible So let's go ahead and jump into the first one now the the first thing that you should absolutely do if you're switching to a New Linux this year is back up your old one. So Most people should have a backup of some kind I've talked about this in a recent video. I've talked about this many times before in the channel always back up your stuff You don't want to lose anything when Disaster strikes, but when you're moving from one place to another from one district to another backing up is a little bit more Involved simply because you're not just talking about the personal files that you've accumulated You obviously want to back those things up too, but you want to back up the dot files that you've Created over the course of your time using your oldest Linux distributions So things like the stuff that's in dot config your browser profiles and stuff like that all that stuff usually like resides in your home directory So my recommendation is just to back up your entire home directory to a external hard drive or whatever That way you have access to not only your personal data but also all the dot files that go along with it and The reason why this is important is simply because it's possible that when you get to the new Linux distribution You may want to use some of that stuff So the best example I can give you is browser profile So if you use Mozilla for example Firefox stores a ton of data about you inside of a dot file called dot Mozilla Inside your home directory if you were to move this from your old distro to your new distro Your Firefox would then take on the properties of your old Firefox from your old distro So things like your extensions would transfer over if you're using user chrome dot get CSS that would transfer over stuff like that It would allow you to kind of have all of your Stuff all of your browser stuff your bookmarks and all that stuff transferred over to your new Distro without you actually having to do anything now Obviously, you'd still have to sign into stuff because that stuff doesn't usually transfer transfer over but All of your base level stuff should be there and it's the same with a lot of different applications So things like OBS and different terminal emulators things like that basically you know window managers You know all that stuff resides in dot files You transfer that stuff over to the new home and your settings are transferred along with you now Obviously, this isn't universal. So there are some things that don't transfer well So if you're using like KDE you can transfer those dot files all you want It doesn't really transfer from one place to another very well if you're using something like X FCE That does usually does a little bit better job of transferring your settings over and at the end of the day You really don't actually have to use any of these dot files if you don't want to if you want to Jump to a new Linux distro and start completely from scratch Because you consider that fun or you just want to kind of be more organized about it or whatever You can do that. It's perfectly fine. And I do that most of the time myself The reason why I say make sure you back up all these dot files is simply so you have them if you do want them It's better to have that stuff on hand than having Wiped it out when you switched and then realize oh man. I really needed that file, but it's gone now Back up yourself. That's the number one thing you should obviously do when you're switching to new distro So the next thing that you want to do before you've burned an ISO before you've Partitioned or anything like that is while you're still in your old distro make a list of the programs that you use and This is probably not a big deal for a lot of people because most people use You know five or seven programs They don't really branch out beyond that But if you use a ton of programs, you know more than 10 you might want to write those things down so that you can redownload them in your new home you want to be able to find those applications and reuse them when you get into your new Linux distribution and the more applications that you use the more Important it is for you to write this up down that way you make sure that everything that you want and need You can read download the next time you need to do so by creating this list You can also have an idea of which distribution you should choose So if you haven't made a choice of what distro to switch to yet by having a list of your applications ready You can kind of do some research over whether or not the distribution that you're considering has Access to the software that you need so a list of software that you have installed that you personally installed is something that is very important not only for Choosing a new distro, but also for when you get to the new one you can Download those things with ease and if you are a bash scripter or really any kind of scripter You can actually turn that list of packages Into a script and install script so that your new package manager will just go through and install all those things and Even if you don't use a script, but you want to use the terminal to install all those things You can usually just copy and paste all the names and stuff and then try to get them to download From the terminal doesn't always work because packaging names differ from distro to distro But you might get lucky and some of them will be the same So having a list of your packages in your applications will allow you to easily Reacquire the software that you need once you get to the new distribution So the next thing that you want to do is take note of your drive names And this is important simply because when you go about Installing your new distribution, especially if you have more than one drive This step is really for only people who have more than one drive If you just have one it really doesn't matter if you have more than one though You want to make sure you're installing your new distribution on the appropriate hard drive You don't want to accidentally overwrite your external hard drive or something like that. That would be you know disastrous you want to make sure that you know what your hard drive name is and It's likely that you probably already do you kind of have an idea over what the brand name of your hard drive is But if you don't you're probably going to want to investigate that so that you know where you should install your new distro You can also pay attention to the Linux designation of what those drives are so slash dev slash Sda sdb whatever that is and I'm showing a little bit of b-roll over how you'd get that information right now You'd use LS BLK in order to get that if you know what those letters are you can most times See those letters in the partition manager of the installer that you're using and that will at least allow you to have some idea over what hard drive is which That way you can ensure that you're installing your new distro on the appropriate hard drive and the last thing that you should do is burn Your new ISO you can use something like DD or a tool like etcher to do this If you're on Windows, you can do use something like Rufus Whatever you want to use etcher is available pretty much everywhere I highly recommend using etcher, but you just burn your ISO onto a USB stick You can tell I'm old because they still use the word burn That's not really what you're doing anymore, but whatever once you've burned your ISO It's just a matter of rebooting into the live environment and actually installing your new system So once you've installed your new Linux distribution, the next thing you should do is update your system It sounds really weird like I just installed this brand new thing The first thing I have to do is and you know update your my system It's like getting a brand new car and having the first thing you need to do is get an oil change It doesn't make a lot of sense But the ISO that you downloaded is probably old in some fashion whether it's you know months old or just a few weeks old It doesn't really matter Somewhere along the line some time has passed since the ISO was created and you installed it and that time passing means that there are updates that you can apply and Updates just simply mean either new features or security updates. Those things are both equally important. So The first thing you want to do After you've installed its update and there's another reason why this is important in my experience The absolute first place you're going to experience a problem when you've installed Linux for the first time or installed Linux distribution for the first time is after that first update if something is going to go wrong After the installation usually that first update is going to be what triggers it So whether there's some incompatibility there or something a lot of times if you find something that goes wrong It's going to happen after that first update. So not only does updating first allow you to get all the newest packages on your system it also allows you to Kind of stress test your system just a little bit to see if everything is going as well as it can You'd much rather have something go wrong at that first moment than after you've set all of your stuff up So update first whether that's from a graphical store like you know Software something or the terminal whatever update your system first And if you don't know how to update you should take this opportunity to find out how you should do so So do your googling if you if there's a store chances are it's going to be fairly obvious how you update your system But if you want to learn how to do it in the terminal you should get you should hop online and Google how do I update X the next distribution and you'll find those answers fairly easily Once you've updated the next task is installing all of your software that you had from the previous time you used to Linux so This is a involved process like I said earlier You can create a script if you're able to do so but most people probably aren't going to get into that depth of Nerd dumb so they're just going to install Applications one at a time. I highly recommend you learn how to do this via the terminal because you can install multiple applications at the same time Instead of having to do it one at a time in a GUI software file manager Most of them don't actually allow you to install multiple things at the same time some of them do not all of them So learn how to install your software from the terminal it'll go a little bit faster the biggest hurdle you're probably going to face here is Package names so your package names on your old Linux distribution are probably going to be different on your new Linux distribution That's a that's just kind of the way Linux is unfortunately It's a horrible practice. I don't know why we haven't fixed this yet where we decided to name something One thing on one distro and another thing on another even though they're the exact same package different package Maintainers is really the reason why that happens But we should kind of come together and realize that that's not very user friendly But that's kind of the way it goes So if you're trying to install a piece of software and it says hey, this is not available hop on Google again or hop on whatever your favorite favorite search engine is and Google that package name and then the name of your new distro. You will probably be able to find The actual name on your distro and then you can install it that way It's definitely something that you're probably going to encounter especially if you're installing from the terminal if you're installing from the Software center or the software store You probably won't encounter this nearly as much simply because you're just you're probably just going to type in the name of the application instead of the package name because those aren't Always the same thing once you've updated and once you've installed your software The next thing is getting all of your personal files in place. So For most people this just means your personal Documents music stuff like that. You probably know how to do that and it's fairly easy just transfer from wherever you backed it up to your new system and You know, it'll take ten minutes or whatever however long it takes and you're done The extra part comes when you're deciding what to do with the dot files you backed up back in step one Now like I said earlier, you don't have to use these at all If you want to completely set up your system brand new so that you're kind of starting from scratch I think most people probably end up going this route But not everybody if you don't want to go that route and you want to keep some of the stuff from your old distro Those dot files is where you're going to find all the settings and stuff that you need to do So before you launch an application for the first time, you really don't have to do that But it's probably better if you do it before you've launched an application for the first time Take the dot file for that particular application and put it in the same place in your new home directory So for example, if you're going to do the Firefox thing take your dot Mozilla file from your backup Which is in the home directory backup that you made Transfer it over to your new home directory and then you can start up Firefox Basically, that process is exactly the same for any application Like I said earlier though, it's not always going to work Some applications do really well and have all their settings and information in those dot files some kind of don't do that they put some stuff in those dot files some stuff in other places and If you don't have all of that stuff in the proper place, you know, it just is not going to work Unfortunately, there's no way for me to tell you which programs are going to work best and whatever You it's really going to be hit or miss when it comes to Which programs work and which ones don't in this way of transferring stuff? but some of them will and having those dot files and transferring them back over into their appropriate places Will allow you to at least keep some of your settings as you go along So there are obviously other ways of doing this. That's this is kind of like the manual way of doing it if you are More technologically inclined having a separate home partition and just using the same home partition every time you switch to a new Link distribution is completely possible I've actually made a video on how to do this So I'll link that in the cards above me in the video description keeping the same home partition Usually makes it easier to keep the same settings between all of your applications It doesn't mean again that it's always going to work But it will probably work better than just transfer things over most of the time probably the reason why I don't say this this is the way you should do it is because Usually most people don't have separate home partitions to actually use maybe you should look into that But most people probably don't do it So transferring from a backup to your new home director is probably the way most people are going to end up doing it But it's not the only way. I just wanted to point that out once you've updated once you've installed your software and Move the dot files that you want to move over You're ready and raring to go you can start exploring your system You've probably already learned some stuff because you've already updated you've already installed stuff So you know all the process behind those two things and now you can just start enjoying Your new system your new home. You've moved you've got all the stuff in the proper places and you are home it's awesome and It's going to be just as awesome for as long as you're there until it's time for you to distro hop again if you're anything Like me or anything like I used to be at least that might last just a couple weeks But the more you distro hop of course the more likely you are to develop a habit of How you switch from distro to distro you will probably build yourself a script so that you can always install your software Really fast you will probably start actually having a separate home partition because it's much makes it much easier to distro hop and all the stuff You'll get used to it You'll become a professional at distro hopping if you don't do it very often It then is when the process that I just described is most helpful So that's it for this video if you have any comments or questions on this You can leave those in the comment section below if I'm a if I was a little bit more rambly and less coherent in this video than I normally was also My classes keep falling down If I was a little bit less eloquent than normal It's because it's like two o'clock in the morning and I'm making a video at two o'clock in the morning And apparently once it passed midnight, I can't talk anymore. This is like it took me like ten tries to do this video I probably should have just waited till tomorrow, but It's done follow me on Twitter at the Linux cache follow me on masses under honesty those links will be in the video description You notice how it's very very Authoritative there's like follow me on Twitter If you would follow me on Twitter, I'd be most appreciative. I'm trying to eat two thousand followers there I don't know why it's gonna go in the crap or any further into the crap or any day now. It doesn't matter It doesn't matter. Okay. See this is what happens when you record at two o'clock in the morning You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cache just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube. 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