I like distro-hopping a lot and currently, I’m on Arch right now with KDE Plasma. I want to copy the looks and feels of my current machine to Debian. How would I do that? Is there an “Export” button I can click?
Have a look at konsave
Just copy the entire contents of your ~./config
and ~/.local/share
.
I just copy my /home/username folder to an external drive every day or so excluding the .cache folder.
rsync / grsync makes this really easy to do and leaves one with no excuses for not doing a regular backup of their data.
That’s also a good way to do it. Although it copies more than just the KDE settings.
For most people copying the home folder, like you suggested, seems like a good option.
If you are going to save the configs, you might as well grab all your data.
I also keep copies of things like /etc/fstab.example, /etc/group, my HUGE /etc/hosts and a few other things with the whole directory structure, so that I can just copy them over as root right at the beginning. Within a few minutes, all my stuff is there and I just have to install a few programs like thunderbird and brave-browser.
Exactly. I don’t really see the point of only saving settings for KDE software (and which KDE software? Only Plasma? Plasma and KDE apps? Why?). Why not just back up everything?
OK, makes sense… except two things:
a) sometimes things screw up because they change (values and/or location)
b) you don’t want to keep all those cache files, like the mozilla mess and such
Currently my hidden folders in home are 46GB
If you use rsync / grsync it will do incremental copies, (check the Use Checksum box) so only changes will get written again. I use grsync and I just add in the [ --exclude .cache ] and I copy mine to a USB drive and it seems to get mounted to the same place each time, but you can always change it.
For me, it’s because I want to save KDE/Plasma settings in my dotfiles repo, next to my system configuration (for NixOS) and config files for other software. These are small files that I keep in a public git repo; I do not want the rest of my data or home directory to be public, but configuration is useful to share.
As it is now, the KDE files in ~/.config
don’t look like they’re meant to be used on different machines - there are too many details about system state. It might work if I could remove the system-specific details and #include
system-specific files, but I’m not sure that’s possible.