if you’re on fedora, your file system is btrfs. that one has subvolumes, think partitions as folders that you don’t hafta pre-size.

so what you can do is install this endeavour thing in its own subvolume; presently you got root (fedora) and home. so you install the new os in /newroot, mount it at / and mount the existing home in its /home.

you don’t mount the old root at all, so fedora is ready and waiting when you grow tired of the new toy, and all your shit is there, no need to backup, restore, miss something etc.

the windows partition is easily taken care of, just format it as btrfs and add it to the existing file system.

this wipe and reinstall way isn’t a thing over here, as it’s rarely needed. good luck!

Meh, why switch? Fedora is already pretty ahead while still being very stable.

You lose that stability with a rolling distro. You’ll end up having to spend your time fixing things more than enjoying your OS.

I’d stick with fedora if I were you.

-1. Backup your home directory with rsync -Paz /home/username destination, this will keep modified dates and copy dotfiles. No asterisks at the end of the path. Restore with the opposite command

0. If your /home directory is on a separate partition, you could try preserving it for the new installation, this will keep all your stuff in place.

1. When I did this, Nextcloud had no problem identifying files correctly, just make sure to not alter file dates

2. User applications should save their configs in your home directory, so the above should keep them safe, but explore each specific app’s behavior.

3. Cinnamon is kinda like KDE in philosophy but based on GTK instead of Qt. It’s not bad, but KDE is so good these days that it’s hard to compete.

4. Idk, I haven’t used Arch in like a decade, but IMHO you’re currently on the best distro available when it comes to reliability and compatibility, so I guess you could expect less of those. If you have secure boot I think you’ll have to jump through a few hoops that Fedora had spared you… you may want to disable it temporarily.

5. If you have multiple disks with the same capacity, disconnect them all except the one you want to install your OS to.

You can mostly just copy your home partition/dir with something like rsync.

Step by step:

1. Install new distro, in the installer make sure to use the same username (otherwise there is some extra work involved but still doable)

2. start up new distro to make sure it works

3. reboot into old distro or into live linux

4. use rsync to copy olddistro/home/user to newdistro/home/user (you have to think about whether it makes sense to overwrite all files or if there is maybe some special exception somehow. Like there may be some idiomatic bashrc on one distro that does not work well with the other)

(I’ve done that multiple times now and there is some minor fixing involved sometimes, like with the bashrc example, but otherwise it’s super easy. If you ever get stuck just hit me up and I can hop on a Rustdesk/discord/whatever support session)

Finally, does anyone have any tips for distro-hopping?

Don’t. 🙂

Or rather, try as many distributions as you want, but use virtual machines for that - once you find one that Just Works, there’s no reason to “hop” anymore.

What holiday?