Copy programs to usb

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Hello everyone and thank you for reading my first post. No major issue, but guidance is needed! Is there a way to put all my downloaded programs on a usb stick and install on a new computer? Or to back up the entire system and restore to a new computer? I’ve looked around and see this and see that, but can’t figure out what the best way is to work it. Can I make a snapper or timeshift backup to a usb and then restore that on a fresh install on a different computer?

Thanks in advance. I’m still in my first year of linux use so I’m definitely still a noob… but I’m coming along pretty good I think. Love it. Love OpenSuse (but also love Fedora). Yesterday I installed windows decorations (klassy) through konsole as I like having the active window titlebar have the accent color. Two months ago it would have sunk my battleship. :blush:

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Hi, welcome
In short: yes, you can do what you want to achieve, but it does not work like with downloaded programs on Windows.

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Yeah I figured the path would be a little more murky what with dependencies and all that. Is there a specific process I could follow or an app? I know NixOs makes it super easy with the config file, but that’s not possible with opensuse, right?

At the end of the day I can just do it manual. But a shortcut would be so great as I have several non-networked computers I’ll be installing it on.

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Basically yes, but you should keep in mind, that an installed system is in some way “tailored” to the specific hardware environment it is installed on.

Although most hardware handling is done by the kernel there can be some packages missing which are necessary to run some of the hardware (e.g. graphics card, wifi, audio, …) of the new computer.

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Ok and thank you. Is there a certain program I should use for best results? Does anyone have a good resource / link I could use?

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To just to add a point…. I’d really like it if my customizations would follow. But even if it’s just programs it would be good.

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What you’re looking for is called dotfiles. Basically everything in your home folder that starts with a dot(.)

Personally, I would just backup my .config and .local folders and make a list of all my programs. Then I’d install them fresh on the new computer and copy some of my dotfiles as needed.

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Not sure if this fits your use case but I keep a text file with a list of my installed packages so that on a new system I can feed it into the package manager and it’ll install everything. This doesn’t work offline but it is much easier.
I’m fairly new to Zypper so maybe someone else can chime in wrt using offline repositories.

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I think what to use depends on your individual setups and what you want to achieve: e.g. you could use dd to make identical copies of the source computers drives and move those copies into your target computer. Or you could copy the content of partitions with cp -a (via network, via USB-drive, …) or …

“customizations” are stored in several places.

Most of the system wide customizations are placed somewhere below /etc while user specific customizations are placed in the users home directories (e.g. /home/USERNAME/.config, /home/USERNAME/.local, …). So if you use a separate partition for /home and want to keep your users customizations you have to move the /home-partition to your new computer as well.

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I actually found some thing talking about this. It just might be perfect and I am going to try this today. Thank you.

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Thank you so much for the reading, this is great stuff to learn.

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Thank you, this exactly the kind of info I need to learn. The starting points are appreciated.

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