SteamOS does not work right on most hardware last I heard. They have specific stuff in there for the exact devices they do support (which are only two I think, SteamDeck and another one of these handhelds). It doesn’t have all drivers for other hardware and there are even tweaks for the AMD chips that are in those things.

For safety you should back up your files regardless(home directory or whatever is actually important there), but if you have your home and root on separate partitions (and even better separate hard drives) you shouldn’t have to restart from scratch. If you do plan on distro hopping and do not have separate partitions it is worth looking into doing that for your next install(honestly think it is a good thing to do generally but it isn’t a big deal). Sometimes configs can be messed up between distro’s but it is rarely a problem in my experience

Everything particular to you should be in /home/$YourUsername/ so if you back that up you should be able to get up and running again quick

You should back up your files when making a major change to your computer, regardless of if it shouldn’t cause problems (you should back up your files routinely anyway; hard drives fail).

On your next install, if you put /home in its own partition, that’ll make distro hopping easier (you should STILL back up your shit sometimes though). This can sometimes be more jank than a clean install though, because programs put their config files in /home, and oops your new distro has an older version of whateverthefuck that gets confused by the newer config file.

Some things to check out when hopping:

• Mint is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian. I think it’s worth exploring that tree.

• Try things with different desktop environments. Mint is Cinnamon, but a lot of people like KDE. There’s also Gnome, XFCE, random shit. You can swap these around to some extent, but a distro with KDE is going to have KDE apps pre-installed and give a more consistent KDE experience.

• Try a tiling window manager! Some people love those fuckers.

• Sick of Debian? Try Fedora or an Arch-based distro like Cachy or Majaro.

• Arch btw? Arch boots to a black screen and expects you to install it yourself via terminal and wiki. Hilarious.

I’m somewhat new to Linux, too, but I have a dedicated hard drive partition for my OS. Had to do a reinstall recently (bricked my PC during the Arch NVIDIA debacle), all I did was wipe that partition and literally everything was ready to go on my data partition once I reinstalled. It should make hopping easier.

Generally speaking yes you wipe your partitions and start over and restore selectively from backups. I recommend backing up /home and /etc (and maybe /boot) and test your backups by stimulating a restore (e.g. to a dir at /home/restore, just see if it is the right size and has your files). If you don’t have a regular backup system, this is a good opportunity to start using one. I like borg-based tools and filesystems that can do snapshots. Then you just make a backup right before you install the new distro, then restore from backup.

You can also start putting /home on its own partition in case you swap distributions often but I’ve never found this appealing. It’s also not a replacement for proper backups. I do set up /home to be discretely snapshotable, though.

Why are you looking to change from Mint? Mint is pretty nice, though I prefer Debian for that kind of distro. I’ve been trying out guix and really like it, though it’s definitely a power user / dev distro, as you have to configure your system using a dialect of Lisp (a programming language).

personally i just go ahead and nuke everything since it’s easier lol, all my really important stuff is backed up to cryptomated cloud storage and everything else i can download again since it’s all free/pirated/“owned” software and videos

i feel like some people actually do make scripts to back up all their config files and whatever, at a minimum you might want to copy your home folder to a USB drive and manually look through it to restore the files you want after installing the new distro

You basically back up /home and maybe /etc/fstab if you’re using the same exact device with multiple drives but don’t want to set up your drive partitions again. If your device only has one physical drive, there’s no point in keeping /etc/fstab since the new distro installation would just create a new /etc/fstab anyways. Backing up /etc/fstab starts making sense if you have like a PC with 6+ physical drives. You could technically just set up all 6 drives through the installer, but I personally would never do that. Whenever I install an OS, I always physically disconnect every single drive except for the drive that the OS is going to. Otherwise, you run into the risk of installing the OS on the wrong drive, wiping data from that drive in the process.

The strigine urge to change Linux distro

I cast aside my earthly data possessions and start again as if I am born anew. I have automated backup scripts for everything i care about and provisioning scripts for a bunch of distros to get me started in most things.

Come join me on Fedora. We love it over here tips me hat

To anyone who’s done it, how do you prepare when you change distro?

I backup my home folder (home/UserName/) and if swapping to a new “family” of linuxes (like from a debian-based one to an arch based one) note down the names of any packages i definitely want to keep using and checking if the new one has it in their repos

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