Hi All,
After distro-hopping for a while, I am now with OpenSuse and finally happy with Linux! After fiddling and tweaking for a while, I now have the installation just as I like it, and now want to migrate from my test PC to my daily driver.
How do I create a backup of my current system and restore it on my new system which has different hardware?
Thanks
You could simply dd the install to a fresh HDD/SSD. Or take the current install and boot it in the new hardware, done that several times, no problem…
Thank you for your response. How will the new drive work if the new PC has different hardware? Won’t the device drivers be different? How will I even have display if the GPU driver is different?
More than happy to try it, I would just like to understand the inner workings of it 
You may want to keep your current system partition. Remove the drive from the test PC and insert in your current PC. Boot into the new system and test thoroughly. 
Note you may need to run mkinird to discover new hardware if the hardware is significantly different. Radically differnt graphics may cause some problem but all is fixable.
Also display resolution may be messed up as well. Best to erase all contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ after copying everything over.
I had a nice plan: Set up the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G in a new case while working with both Intel i3-4130 and i7-6700K. When done I swapped the disks of the i3-4130 and the Ryzen 5 3400G. Installing the bootloader would do the trick. That worked well for some time. But eventually the stuff hit the fan: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177428
BTW: Version 5.8.11-1-MANJARO + amd-ucode.img works fine for suspend/resume.
I do something a bit funky. A traveling OS. I have an NVME SSD installed into an USB-C + USB 3.1 enclosure and I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and LEAP 15.2 on it.
I boot using this stick on a custom desktop, Alienware 15, Panasonic CF-19Mk6, Lenovo T420, W530 and T480 and sometimes on a friend/colleague’s computer. Most of my machines either have only integrated intel GPU or optimus integrated intel + Nvidia drivers. There is a list of commands that I run whenever I switch computers to make it work more or less flawlessly.
I cannot say much for AMD<->Intel/Nvidia<->Radeon change but above works just fine with minimal lines of commands.
To back up, you could use completely clone your existing system into another drive, but this can simply be used to install into a new drive and keep the old drive as a backup. I wrote something about it here (https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/536408-Distro-invariant-SSD-HDD-cloning-procedure-to-an-equal-size-or-large-size-using-dd).
Recommend backup which can be a copy and not simply moving your drive to new hardware. It would probably work nearly 100% of the time, but if there’s anything irreplaceable or only replaceable with great pain, I wouldn’t risk the 0riginal.
You can dd your drive or use an app like Clonezilla to make an exact copy of your disk and/or partitions…
Shouldn’t need to rebuild the kernel (mkintrd),
The udev subsystem should do a good job of recognizing the changed hardware and instruct the system to use the correct drivers which nowadays are typically distributed in the kernel.
Good Luck!
TSU
Thanks all for your suggestions. I will try cloning to a new drive and see what happens. If that fails for whatever reason then I will do a clean install of OpenSuse on the new machine and restore my files and settings from a backup image of the test pc.
As a side note, I am not new to Linux in general, but I am still somewhat of a noob. What I will say though is that people can keep championing Ubuntu as the king of beginner distros, and it certainly has its place I’m sure, but OpenSuse has been such a pleasure to work with so far, very straight forward and seems to be extremely stable.
Also, the forum peeps seems less inclined to jump straight to the RTFM mentality… (looking at you Arch forums). So thanks for the help