How do I migrate my KDE settings?

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.

4 Likes

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. :grinning:

2 Likes

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.

1 Like

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?

2 Likes

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 :crazy_face:

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.