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I'm ready to move from Mint and do some Distro Hopping. What's your suggestions on how to best do this from stock Mint 22.2? (lemmy.today)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev
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Screenshot of my partitions. Partition 1 if EFI, Partition 2 is Mint Boot sector I believe. Partition 3 is everything else.

I'm looking to give OpenSUSE TW and Fedora a try specifically. HD is encrypted from install, and I didn't know to put /home on its own partition.

Plenty of storage space to play with. How should I approach hopping with the least amount of pain and cleanup when I finally figure out where I want to land?

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[–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'd take this opportunity to move /home too its own place. A volume on Btrfs sounds good.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Is that all I should search for? If there's anything in particular I should search for to get a good guide, that would be great.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    My Google fu these days is crap. But the concept is this:

    1. Get an external HD, format it to ext4.
    2. Copy your /home to it.
    3. Make a backup of anything else you find valuable.
    4. Use the distro installer to erase your / filesystem and create another in its place with Btrfs and at least two volumes: one @home and one @.

    Instead of relying on the installer for that (many nowadays are simplified and don't offer much options), I like to use a live GParted ISO. The live GParted is a disk recovery/maintenance mini distro that has friendly graphical tools. You put it on a thumb drive keep it around just in case. And it can be used to create new filesystems like above.

    Oh, BTW, keep your LVM+LUKS encryption setup. Not a time to be messing with that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I love btrfs and have a similar partition setup, but I'm not sure if the rest of the setup that'd be required to install into this is going to be good for someone wanting assistance with moving their home directory. in particular likely not being able to use any graphical installers since I don't know any that support installing into subvolumes

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Mint installer uses Btrfs if present and defaults to two volumes. Suse Tumbleweed, cited by the author, defaults to Btrfs (and uses it expertly with each update, to allow rollbacks without affecting user data).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    depending on how much free space you have on your drive and the size of your home folder, the easiest way would just be to

    1. boot into some live image with gparted (basically any live image)
    2. use gparted to resize your root and add a new partition for /home
    3. copy the whole /home folder contents over to the new partition
    4. if you want your existing install to work: edit your fstab to mount the new partition as /home. the arch wiki should have good instructions for this, doesn't matter if you aren't using arch
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