Only answering these parts.alcornoqui wrote: Sun Aug 10, 2025 1:57 pm Congrats to the team and community!
After reading the thread I have a few questions on upgrading. First, my recollection, mostly from asqwerth:
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And my questions:
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Now, some of the machines don't have separate /home partition: Will the "Preserve /home" option work in that case? If not, what would you recommend doing?
And just to be sure, is it expected that most stuff works after a fresh install preserving /home or problems are frequent? Which are the most frequent?
Thanks for the great work, awesome distro!
The last time I preserved /home that was in the root partition was an install of MX18 or 19. It worked fine.
I believe that if you choose this option, the installer will go through the process of manually deleting the contents of the whole partition except whatever is in /home, before writing (ie installing) MX25 contents into the said partition.
***I haven't done it since because I decided I had tons of disk space so could just create a new partition for the new MX install, then selectively copy over which ever parts of the old install's /home into the new install's /home. I understand @Stevo uses the "preserve home" method still. Perhaps he can confirm it still works fine.
Just beware that I have also seen mentions in this forum that if your /home was encrypted, it might not be so easy to preserve home during the install, though I don't really know if this is true or not.
As for whether stuff works after a fresh install preserving home, I think the main thing to consider would be whether there been a drastic change in Desktop environment version between old and new MX install? If so, the config files and settings may be very different so preserving them may lead to the new DE version in the new install not being set up properly.
Thus, since XFCE in MX23 is ver 4.20 while the latest XFCE is still merely a point release of 4.20, it should be ok to preserve home for MX XFCE.
However, since Plasma in MX23 is 5.++++ while MX25 will have Plasma 6, preserving home for MX KDE with PLasma 5 configs, may lead to some wonkiness in PLasma 6. But if you set your customisation in the Plasma 5 install back to as default as you can (themes, icons, plasma desktop theme, sddm theme, remove third party widgets/plasmoids) before you do an install which preserves /home, it should go much better.
Certainly, if you are running the Event Calendar plasmoid or Latte Dock in Plasma 5, remove/uninstall them first before the install that preserves home. These 2 do not work in Plasma 6, so having a config that tries to start these 2 things will likely crash your desktop when you log into your new install for the first time.
Similar issues will affect the usual user applications you use. But they mostly should work. And if they don't, it's pretty easy to reset the configs. Just close the app that's wonky, move the config files/folders to Trash (or rename them something else), then open your app. It should now be reset to default, and a clean new config file/folder created in your $HOME.
It tends to be harder to remove configs for the DE using graphical tools, because you are in the midst of its graphical environment while trying to delete parts of its configs. You would probably need to do it in terminal to be safe. Also, the DE config files are all over the place in $HOME, so it would be best to ask for forum help if you ever think this is something you need to do.
***NOTE: That's the reason I mainly copy over data/media from HOME, and do selective copying over of only SOME config files now. Less potential issues. I copy the $HOME/.mozilla folder for my Firefox, configs for geany, strawberry and qmplay2 (my media players) and some other apps. I tend not to copy over DE config files, and do the customisation of the new DE from scratch in the new install.
