I have a simple wish, with a probably not so simple solution.
I recently started with linux (Arch kde), I’m loving it, I quickly realized that this OS and almost all apps, are highly customizable, I’m laving that as well. My problem is the unavoidable reinstalls and that I have a laptop.
Is there any way that I can save all my configs, apps and my apps’ configs, and transfer them over to my laptop, while almost having a very quick back-up. I realize that I could turn it into an ISO somehow, but that wouldn’t work (I think) because my laptop has vastly different hardware. I also realize the partitioning problem. So in my idealistic world, there should be a solution that requires a clean install (from scripts or manual) and some .sh file, that installs all my apps, pastes all my configs and reboots.
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?
For final words I’d like to say that I’m far from finished configurating, but I’d like to know the proccess, to not shoot myself in the foot somewhere along the way of configing, thanks!
Reinstall? Why?
Create a separate partition for /home and don’t format it when reinstalling, so you will keep all your stuff.
This is the way, I’ve kept a 7 year old install going this way, through 3 laptops and even LUKS encryption.
Analyzing your comment in a different light. What your saying is if I copy my /home (someone said /etc too) over to my laptop, and back it up as well, I’m golden?
would different hostnames and usernames make a problem? As far as my knowledge goes it won’t as long as I also bring /etc over, but I have no Idea if /etc is connected to something deeper or not.
And also also, might seem like a dumb question but I had to edit a file to automount my other disks at startup, won’t it like break everything if my system only gets /home after boot or something? Caz I have enought free space to copy over my existing /home, delete it, partition, and mount it back. What’d the benefits and dangers be?
There’s a distro called NixOS that is created for this purpose. It also has a tool called home manager that will manage your dot files for you. Once you back up like two or three configuration files you can recreate your system (minus any actual data)
When you do this in Arch there’s no guarantee you get the same package versions and there’s no guarantee everything works
To add to this, another viable path is using Nix, the package manager, on its own. That way you can get Home Manager to manage your applications and dotfiles independently of your base system, as long as you are able to install Nix.
It’s my general workflow, run Determinate Nix Installer, install Home Manager, clone my config and I’m off to the races. Been sharing that config between Debian, Ubuntu on WSL and Bazzite for a while and it’s served me well so far.
For the OS side a few ways.
- Clone & then rename+change drivers
- Ansible/chef
- NixOS
For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.
There is a pacman command that prints the list of all packages installed by users. I don’t remenber the command sorry but you’ll find that here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks
Its probably “pacman -Qe”.
Then it should be easy to create a script that install all that automaticcally. If your are cautious you should have a backup of your home anyway on some storage device .
Huh, does everything store it’s configs in ~/.config ? Is it some unwritten rule? That’d make life so much easier.
Sorry I edited my post, I was wrong.
.config stores many apps settings. But unfortunately some apps stores that directly in ~ as hidden files and directories. Personnally I make a backup of my whole home.
oh, no problem, at least I know now. Thanks!
I think you could install your system using a generic kernel, package it up as ISO and just boot it on basically any other machine with the same architecture. Proprietary bits like NVidia driver and firmware could pose a problem.
That’s basically what a live USB is.You could likely use
ddor clonezilla to create a duplicate of your boot drive and boot your laptop right from that, but that’s not quite what you’re after.There are some distros lately that use a declarative config file to set the whole thing up that I think is much more what you have in mind. The big ones that come up a lot are nixOS and Fedora Silverblue. Maybe one of those systems would be to your liking.
What your saying is that I can dd / ?
that’s very alien to me.
dd duplicates directories. It’s a terminal app. Built into all Linux distros. For more details, do a
man ddin a terminal session. Clonezilla is a distro that runs a live system from USB or DVD which lets you backup and restore entire systems. Both are powerful, but have a learning curve.
Usually with most Linux distributions you can just make a tarball of the entire system (don’t forget the p to preserve ownership,…) and unpack it to a new partition, install the boot loader again and it should work on a new system, as long as the kernel does work with the hardware on the new system. Alternatively you can reinstall and keep your home directory to keep all your user config.
Reinstalling is Windows-user logic. Also why start with Arch Linux of all distros.
friends used it, tryied it, stuck with it. But wdym Windows user logic? What do I do when I brick something?
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!
Wait, so… I can copy everything as-is except /boot ?
~/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.
And if I make a user with the same username on the other system, it’ll just… connect?
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 don’t even know how-to, or what it truly means to encrypt, so I don’t have to worry about that. And I just love hearing the other parts. Thanks
I don’t know by heart if it’s able to do your bidding, but perhaps it’s worth checking out penguins-eggs. I guess the following would be its elevator pitch:
"penguins-eggs is a console tool, under continuous development, that allows you to remaster your system and redistribute it as live images on usb sticks or via PXE.
The default behavior is total removal of the system’s data and users, but it is also possible to remaster the system including the data and accounts of present users, using flag --clone. It is also possible to keep the users and files present under an encrypted LUKS file within the same resulting iso file, flag --cryptedclone.
You can easily install the resulting live system with the calamares installer or the internal TUI krill installer."
This sounds scary, but an option! I’ll put it at the end of the list, thanks!
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 :)
tbh I bearly have experience in any distro, but Arch didn’t pose that much of a challange. I might switch, but I really don’t see the advantage I’d get. Maybe to Debian, I used it’s terminal. But, great Idea to mess around in VMs first!
Can you explain this step:
and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install.
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.
wonderful, thank you for the info. I’ll have to sleep on this tho.
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
Thank you. You wrote so much that I checked out your profile, I just wanna say: Enjoy your time on Lemmy! And that I am honored to have more then half of your all time comments be answers to me.
Let’s do the Time-shift again!!!
NixOS and to a lesser extent nix package manager is great for this. Write a config for your entire setup, which will take a long time, but then you can carry that config with you through any and all future machines, and have every one of them setup just the way you like from the beginning
I would highly suggest using NixOS for something like this, however if you don’t want to/can’t the following should apply to pretty much any other distro
Most applications in Linux save their config in ~/. config/ or ~/.configname , if you copy these files and directories over to your new machine all your old settings should persist (this won’t copy applications themselves but will copy their settings for when you reinstall them)
(though be warned this is a messy way to do it if you just copy absolutely everything without thinking, some settings you probably don’t want copied over)
tbh, messy way it is, or maybe I’ll clean the data up becore transfer, we’ll see. thx!
