My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I'd like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly.
What I would like to achieve is to have my small handful of flatpak apps and flatpak steam games on a separate partition to quickly access while I test and troubleshoot issues.
Is that possible to do with flatpaks?
When installing Linux, you first have to partition your hard drive.
You can create a seperate partition for your /home folder in addition to the one you create for the rest of the system.
Then when you install a different distro, you can tell the installer to use your /home partition without changing or formatting it. After installation, you will have the new Linux system and the /home folder from your old one. That way, all user settings and flatpak settings will be the same as before reinstalling.
But if you're a new Linux user, I don't know how helpful this is. It's easier to just copy everything in /home to an external drive, then copy it back after you reinstalled, for the same effect.
That first bit makes sense, I should be able to figure that out I think.
The reason I want to avoid using an external drive is because it takes a minimum an hour to transfer 4 games worth of data currently. That time is an inhibiting factor for me. I'd like to minimize downtime.
Also I'd like to test gaming oriented distributions with newer kernels compared to what Linux Mint ships with.