- Get an external HDD or SSD drive and put your home partition on it;
- Get a fast USB pen drive (or another external disk drive, if you want) and put some random distro on it;
- Boot from your the USB drive;
- Login as the default distro user and create your user;
- Mount the external home partition on your /home/user directory;
- Apply a bit of chown and chmod magic if necessary;
- Login as your user and try the distro;
- Wipe the USB pen and burn another random distro;
- GOTO 3.
Hey, it's great to try out some distros until you find the one that suits you. If your /home is on a different partition, you're mostly fine already (make sure you don't accidentally delete it!). Depending on your setup, you may have changed some files in /etc as well that you may want to backup. Also check your /opt folder and backup whatever you may need from there. When I reinstall, I also make a list of installed packages to reinstall afterwards so I don't need to look them up again.
Also, if possible, make sure you have a functioning second computer or at least smartphone with internet access at hand in case anything goes wrong :)
Otherwise good luck and happy distro hopping!
Thanks! Yeah I have only a few changes to /etc and /opt. So I will need to reinstall everything in the end? Or just things that install into / rather than /home for some reason?
The exact structure can be different with different distros. When I used arch a decade ago, all config basically went into /etc/rc.conf IIRC, debian/Ubuntu never did that. I don't know pop OS and haven't used kubuntu in a while, so I can't say anything about that. Just be aware that you may have to redo some configuration. Also, you will have to reinstall basically everything except for some wine apps or so that are stored in /home
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