Use rsync over the network to copy stuff across from the old machine to the new machine if you are just using the main internal drives. Alternatively you can mo

Use rsync over the network to copy stuff across from the old machine to the new machine if you are just using the main internal drives. Alternatively you can move stuff over with 'sneaker net' - USB drives. If you have the capability of using extra drives on both machines, you can move the extra drive from the old machine to the new machine, holus bolus. Disconnect from one, reconnect to the other and you magically have 4TB of files moved over. Plan your directory layout to minimise stuff being all over the place. Why have archive stuff (the 'write once, keep forever' stuff like music, photos, videos, source-code, etc, etc in your /home directory? That directory is for purely personal stuff and/or stuff that's a 'work in progress'.) I dedicate a whole partition or drive to that archive stuff. It never needs to be changed. If it's on a separate hard-drive or NVME SSD you can physically shift it from one machine to the next. Do you have a script in your dotfiles to install and configure all your apps Yes. That script copies across, whenever possible, the /etc directories that contain the relevant config files immediately after a new distro version is installed. Then when you actually install the app packages, the package-manager will use those 'old' config files. I have some scripts that allow a complete rebuild from scratch, including the root re-installation, in around 2 hours total. (If you look ahead and keep a list of all the installed packages plus a copy of the /etc config files every day, You can install the distro from scratch, re-install the list of packages and rebuild that new installation to where you were last night with the old installation very easily.)