my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro.
I wouldn’t sweat that at all.
I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.
A good way to keep this easy for yourself is to keep the files you actually care about like pictures, game saves, documents, etc all on a separate partition. It makes it very easy to make a backup for distro hopping.
You can nuke your OS as many times as you like, and everything will be exactly in the same place.
I wouldn’t sweat that at all.
I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.
A good way to keep this easy for yourself is to keep the files you actually care about like pictures, game saves, documents, etc all on a separate partition. It makes it very easy to make a backup for distro hopping.
You can nuke your OS as many times as you like, and everything will be exactly in the same place.
If you want to be slightly fancier, you can use a btrfs subvolume and not have to worry about sizing partitions correctly.
@cadekat @Olgratin_Magmatoe doesn’t ext4 have this feature or am I missing something?
I don’t believe it does, but I could be wrong!