How to move linux distros without losing data

Question

If I have these locations all on separate partitions:

How can I remove Ubuntu (for example) and install Mint and lose no data? How would I preserve installed packages across the move?

I can't imagine it's a good idea to try this - you might get away with it since Mint is so similar to Ubuntu, but I would not be surprised if you ended up with a broken system. You can certainly preserve your data (as in, everything in /home), but expecting installed packages to work is probably unrealistic. — user55325, Commented May 13, 2014 at 5:10

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:22:56Z

1

in my opinion, a safer way to achieve that would be to backup those directories and then re-install with the distribution of your choice.

If you want to backup your installed package list for re-installation later, you could try something like:

dpkg --get-selections > ~/Package.list

and then to restore the list later (on a debian based distro):

dpkg --set-selections < ~/Package.list
deselect

CommunityBot

1

answered May 13, 2014 at 5:34

Jason Lewis

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