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Comment by paride5745 | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched from Fedora to Linux Mint Debian Edition (I work mostly with Debian servers so I am more comfortable with apt than dnf), and the switch has been smooth for me.

I keep my home directory organized and backed up on my NAS, so for me reinstalling is straightforward. Also I use Flatpaks whenever possible, so reinstall them is just looking at ~/.var/app and reinstalling what is there.

Other files to back up might be custom /etc confs, and maybe lists of packages you need (dpkg -l or rpm -qa are your friends).

I also use Linux brew for some more up to date software (e.g. golang) and just brew list is your command to get what you have installed.

In general, keep a backup of your home folder (I suggest skipping backing up ~/.cache to save some time and space) and you are mostly good to go.

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- `brew list` doesn't include apps you install from 3rd party taps, or casks, so `brew list --full-name` + `brew list --full-name --cask` is better

- Many apps store their config and user data outside of the home dir. I always find it dishonest when people say backing up home is enough on Linux. You did say "mostly ready to go", but that's exactly the tricky and important part that most people pretend doesn't exist

E.g. Docker volumes are in /var/lib/docker

So /etc/... and /var/lib are generally worth checking as well, but that probably still doesn't cover everything, as not all apps behave as maybe XDG specifies.

Ideally you shouldn't have to backup /var/lib/docker, as your docker configs should live in your docker-compose.yaml or whatever you use to start your docker containers.

Also I have included backing up /etc confs in my original post.

I agree on the brew list being incomplete, totally forgot about casks. Not even sure if they work correctly under Linux to be honest. I literally just use brew for golang and awscli :P

Re Docker I said volumes, not config. Some volumes you might have mapped to the host and maybe picked a home subdirectory, but others maybe not. For example the Ollama 3rd party UI `open-web-ui` suggests to run it like this in their documentation:

`docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main`

Then "open-webui" will be in `/var/lib/docker/volumes/open-webui/`.

Sure you can change it, but what I mean is that a lot of software by itself, or by you following documentation, puts data that you usually want to back up outside of your home.

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