Linux Distro Hopping Tips and Tricks

We hop from Ubuntu to Linux Mint in this video...

Please join the discussion at EzeeTalk.

[Moist-Tree-Rat]

I used to be indecisive but now I'm not so sure....

[jtanner]

Dude, this is amazing! I was just about to try making a hop to a new distro and try to preserve my data for the first time. I've distro hopped before but didn't do it in any kind of sophisticated way. (Just back up to whole damn drive and manually put stuff back) I really appreciate this video. Subbing and bookmarking this vid. Also, I'll be emailing you for a copy of that script to customize. Thanks, Joe!

[banjoperator]

Mr. Collins, another fine video and somemore info gleaned, thank you sir..hope your feeling much better if not completely well by now.. take care and it was awesome to hang out withyou today..makes the day just a little better...cheers

[inchnamoink]

I just wanted to put in a note to say thank you for your tutorial videos. I have JUST come across them and man, they are SO useful and easy to follow. Microsoft dropping support for Windows 7 has given me the final push to switch over. I’ve installed mint on my ssd + hdd machine and your partitioning scheme and moving /home tutorials have been super useful. Thank you sir. You have a new dedicated subscriber!

[clintonbeckway]

Thanks to you I have switched from windows to Linux Mint and it's the best thing I have done, your videos have helped me alot. I only wished I switched year ago.

[wgvazquez]

awesome - great attitude and very concise - useful - and informative. looking for someone like this. This may help me move to the next level of understanding terminal and scripts .Thanks Joe....Linux mint and Ubuntu are my favorites. loved the dig on the guys who just talk about superman's distro...

[ianmagee]

I do something similar to this for distro changes and rebuilds, but I've automated a lot of the steps with shell scripts. A couple of things I do differently - I use the same UID for every installs and I use YADM (yet another dotfile manager) to manage my customizations from an external git repo. The main advantage of this approach is that you can maintain config settings for different desktop environments that persist across multiple rebuilds.

[paulb]

Also, I just used this method to change my main OS from Mint 19.1 to Debian 10. Debian came up and is running flawlessly. Better than I've seen before and being a major distro hopper, I've seen a few OS installs. Most of my distro hopping now is using Virtualbox though. Keeps me satisfied.

[dwbsovran]

I am with you about being set on a distribution and its desktop environment. LM Cinnamon with Nemo is wired exactly as I am. It was like I had always used it when I switched. It requires no thought to get it done. I run two other distros on my extra computer and while they are fun and also run flawlessly, they do not work the way I do and slow me down - I have to think about what I am doing and where I am going.

[daveleitz]

I used Mint XFCE for years. More recently I was on Kubuntu for about 6 months. They're both great for what they do. However, now I'm using default Ubuntu with Gnome. It took some time to line up the extensions I need to make Gnome usable, but now I'm quite satisfied.

I highly recommend the Unite extension together with Ant Slim themes. Unite gets rid of those useless window title bars on maximized windows for applications that use traditional menus. Ant Slim also saves screen real estate by slimming down Gnome's fat title bars.

More recently I discovered another Gnome extension called CPUFreq which gives me the ability to set my processor's performance mode in a couple of clicks. I'm not aware of any similar add-ons for other desktop environments, so I'm sticking with Gnome. I never thought I'd say that. :)

[mikeorjimmy]

Don't throw stuff away, I still have tax records stored on a Zip Drive.

[flhrci]

You are funny! I loved your Tech nerd DVD impression. Love your videos.

[AndrewErwin]

My drive is partitioned with separate EFI, root (/), var (/var), opt (/opt), and home (/home) partitions. If I want to hop, I really just have to deal in the root partition. And I have a shell script that will install all of my main software. I can have just about any distro up and running with all of my personal settings, as if nothing happened, in an hour or less.
Another important thing is to make sure that you import all of your configs to the /home partition (they usually default to either /etc or /usr).

[benriful]

That find file / program / whatever thing for me is KDE. Just start typing already - the search bar pops up at the first key you press. Want keyboard shortcuts to your own specifications - no prob, each and every program can be set right there in the menu.
Don't get me wrong, KDE out the box tends to have a bit of tweaking necessary to make it ideal "for me". But it's the only one I can in fact tweak to the extent I wish. Gnome is "nice" out the box, but very far from great - every time I attempt modifying it to suit "me" I run into breakages, especially those extensions. Worse when an update breaks a previously working extension. As for others, my second favourite is a tie between Xfce and Mate, followed by Cinnamon in 4th - due to the amount of tweaking can enforce on them to make them exactly to my liking. Gnome actually falls into "the rest" camp due to its near incompetent customization abilities in relation to those, but that's me.

[fernandocaballero]

Awesome dude ty for sharing and showing how to do this stuff, linux mint rocks! Best distro for new users

[hanes]

Gnome needs a better file manager, it's so weak and because it's gnome it affect so many distros. It's so bad and gotten worse.

[Aitiustus]

I've never planned ahead when installing Linux but while installing a certain distro that I will not name, I came across the convention of creating a separate home partition. So if I'm understanding correctly, I could go to tty, umount the related /dev/*, cfdisk to resize then create a new partition, mount my drives with the new partition mounted to user, name it, copy my data to from home to it, delete home and name the new partition to home right?

If that would work, I think it would be a lot faster than copying everything to a separate drive since it would just be a new partition on the same drive.

[jarod]

Just discovered your channel. Enjoying it!

[eznix]

Hey Joe... Whenever I have changed distros, I just boot into a live system, mount the /home partition and delete all the dot files and folders (except for .mozilla and .thunderbird) in my /home folder. I never had any problems with weirdness transferring from one desktop environment to another this way. If I know I am using the same desktop environment, I just install over the /home with the same username and do not format the /home partition. Great video. :-)

[walter_lesaulnier]

Thank you for this video- I'm a hopeless tinkerer/ distro hopper and I'd heard several times to manually create a separate home partition (and others if needed) but then they don't say how to properly swap distos and keep the partitions intact and set up so the new distro can use it (them).