Have you mounted your Home directory to a separate partition from the root? If you have not, then I strongly recommend you to do that because if you happen to format you Linux or change to a different Linux distro, then you can keep all your files in Home without formatting it. It is similar to creating a separate partition in Windows just for storing your data. When you format your C: drive, the data in your D: drive can be saved.
If you already have a separate partition for your Home folder, then there is a trick you can do before switching distro. This will avoid messing up the settings in your new Linux such as the position of the task bar, the theme, desktop icons, and so on. This is especially necessary when switching from a Gnome distro to a KDE distro.
The Trick
Before installing a different Linux on your computer, you should go to your Home directory. Then you need to be able to see the hidden files and folders. To do this in Gnome, click on “View”, then click on “Show Hidden Files” in your file browser. You will then see files and folders with names that begin with a period. Those are the hidden files and folders in Linux. You will need to delete them all except for the ones that you need. For example, I know I want to keep my Tomboy Notes, so I will not delete the “.tomboy” folder. Also, I want to keep my virtual machines that I have created in VirtualBox, so I will keep the folder “.VirtualBox”. After you have deleted all those hidden folders and files, you can restart your computer and install your new Linux distro. This way, your new Linux distro will not be messed up.
My Linux Mint was messed up the first time I installed it over my Ubuntu. Linux Mint has its own customized theme with a single task bar at the bottom of the screen. But it turned out to have top and bottom task bars, just like Ubuntu. After deleting the hidden files and folder in Home and reinstalling Linux Mint, the customized theme is back.
Generally if you delete the .gnome or .kde files/folders and log out and in again, they’ll be reset to the distro’s default. Meaning, you likely didn’t need to reinstall to get it working. Its a great “trick” to be able to reset the u7ser’s config like that, very simple. As it should be.
Thanks for your advice. It’s good to know that deleting the .gnome or .kde files would do the trick. However, I have had instance where after installing a different distro, my firefox wouldn’t start until I deleted the .mozilla folder. So it makes me feel safer by deleting all the hidden files and folders.
I believe it’s safer to delete your old home directory when changing distros and even versions of the same distro, because too often the old config file messes uo the new install. Instead, create a separate partition containing all your data files and other files like your Opera bookmarks or your tomboy files. Then make symlinks to the appropriate places in your new home directory and you get your old data back. It’s also possible this way to run several distros in parallel and, so long as the UID# and user name is the same, switch back and forth among distros while retaining all the bookmarks, data files, and tomboy files.