Things to consider when changing your Linux system

I’ve been working in Mint for the past years, but I somehow feel I should be running Debian. So after trying it in a Virtualbox for a while, I have decided to go ahead. It takes a thorough preparation though: I need to make sure not to loose anything or any any functionality. Apart from all the usual applications I need:

  • Audacity
  • (ca-certificates)
  • Calibre
  • Chirp
  • Citrix Receiver
  • (dropbox)
  • Emacs
  • Filezilla
  • (fonts)
  • Freemind
  • (git)
  • Inkscape
  • Kazam
  • (keyboard compose key)
  • (lame)
  • (Libreoffice spelling)
  • Midnight commander
  • Notes
  • Openshot
  • Oracle VM Virtualbox
  • (pavucontrol)
  • PDF-Shuffler
  • Pencil
  • Plume
  • R/Rstudio
  • Remmina
  • Scribus
  • Shotwell
  • Skype
  • Sweethome3D
  • Team viewer
  • VLC
  • (VPN/network-manager-openvpn-gnome/openvpn)
  • Xournal
  • yEd

Scrivener!

They all seem to work in Debian, so functionality should be covered.

Now we need a good system and data backup of course, but we also need to ask a couple of questions:

  • Am I able to reproduce all the user/password combinations saved in Firefox,?
  • How am I partitioning my drive(s) and assigning mount points?
  • Do I have a good checklist for configuration changes I did on the old system that help me work well?
  • Is there any hardware that needs additional drivers? Am I able to find these drivers and set things up?
  • If I use bookmarks, have I got a backup?
  • Do I want to encrypt things? How about backups if I do?

(more to follow)