Best way to transfer Linux to another computer ?

Deadjasper

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I've sorta painted myself in a corner. I'm wanting to upgrade my main box to the latest Linux Mint 19.
To that end I have been testing and configuring on another box. It just occurred to me that if I mover this HD to my main computer I'd be almost home free. Is this advisable or would I be better off just doing a fresh install on my main box?

TIA
 
If you don't have a ton of kernel stuff bolted on or a very specific custom compiled kernel or something you should be good. Nvidia-Nvidia won't be an issue. Not a lot of other kernel bolt ons... some realtek drivers perhaps that use DKMS or something. Depending on your distro it would be varying levels of pain to boot to a terminal from a fall back kernel (or a safe mode boot) and reinstall/compile your kernel if need be.

Worse case just do a clean install and copy over your /home almost all Linux software uses the proper /home/user/.conf for software settings... and if anything you added went to the proper /home/user/.local locations it shouldn't be all that painful.

For the most part these days I just do a clean install... and copy home stuff. This pulls basically 95% of my software configs ect.
 
Thanks. Now I have another stupid problem. Somehow Waterfox got installed and stupid Google returned how to uninstall Firefox instead of Waterfox. Can you tell me how to uninstall Waterfox ?
 
Depending on the distro your package manager will probably also have a way to bckup a list of installed packages and restore them.

For example in arch
pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt
then after copying over the pkglist.txt you can use
pacman -S --needed - < pkglist.txt
 
Thanks. Now I have another stupid problem. Somehow Waterfox got installed and stupid Google returned how to uninstall Firefox instead of Waterfox. Can you tell me how to uninstall Waterfox ?

Can't say I have every used waterfox. What distro ? Can you not uninstall the package.
 
Waterfox showed up after I tried a few Fastdial addons. I did not install it. Now I can't find any trace of it so I can't uninstall it. When I click on a link in a Thunderbird email it opens Waterfox instead of Firefox and asks if I want to set it as my default browser.

Acts just like a virus.
 
Waterfox showed up after I tried a few Fastdial addons. I did not install it. Now I can't find any trace of it so I can't uninstall it. When I click on a link in a Thunderbird email it opens Waterfox instead of Firefox and asks if I want to set it as my default browser.

Acts just like a virus.

Nuke from orbit.
 
You just bung the HDD into the other machine, I've done it heaps of times and the OS just booted as if nothing had changed. In the case of Nvidia it just booted using Nouveau.

What distro did you install Waterfox on, should be simple to uninstall?
 
You just bung the HDD into the other machine, I've done it heaps of times and the OS just booted as if nothing had changed. In the case of Nvidia it just booted using Nouveau.

What distro did you install Waterfox on, should be simple to uninstall?

It's a done deal. Still have a good bit of personalizing to do but the main stuff is working.
I did not install Waterfox, it installed along with an addon and could not be removed. This is why I did a fresh install instead of just moving the HD. I've never encountered anything like this before with Firefox or Linux.
 
It's a done deal. Still have a good bit of personalizing to do but the main stuff is working.
I did not install Waterfox, it installed along with an addon and could not be removed. This is why I did a fresh install instead of just moving the HD. I've never encountered anything like this before with Firefox or Linux.

Excellent! Remember, when it comes to Linux most of the drivers are included in the kernel - Meaning swapping installs from one machine to another is usually successful.
 
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