Is it possible to clone a profile from one laptop to another?

[marclar]

Hi - I have Kubuntu on my home and work laptops. Is it possible to clone my entire profile (apps, settings, etc.) from my work machine to my home machine?

[chimak111]

This question is being asked quite often. I haven't seen an authoritative answer either way. My suspicion is that it's complicated by the complexity of many of the *rc files.

[jglen490]

Hi - I have Kubuntu on my home and work laptops. Is it possible to clone my entire profile (apps, settings, etc.) from my work machine to my home machine?

Assuming that ALL things are equal for both laptops (hardware, software, network), and by using a tool such as Clonezilla then both laptops should look, act, and operate identically. To the extent that there are differences, you will need to make adjustments on the target machine. There is no single answer to that question; the answer is ALWAYS conditional. Can you do it? Yes. Will it work? Maybe. Will you have to tune the the target machine? Highly likely, and no guarantees.

[claydoh]

Do your work and home systems run the same version of Kubuntu? Which version? Are the user names the same?

copying your user data and application settings might be as simple as copying the user's folder (/home/your-username) to the second system's /home , if the above is true, letting it overwrite duplicate files. There may be some cache files that can't be copied, and that is perfectly fine that they don't, you can skip them.

If not, it is still somewhat simple - copy the entire home dir to portable storage ( I recommend using Ark to make a compressed archive - this helps prevent data corruption). Extract the contents somewhere, the usb stick or portable drive is a good place if you have room, but anywhere will do. Then rename the /your-username to the second system's username. While in Dolphin, where you renamed the folder (not inside it), hit F4 to open dolphin's terminal app. There, enter this to change ownership of the entire /username folder to match the second system's user account:

sudo chown -R ./username username:username

Now, you can copy that folder to /home, again letting it overwrite everything. There will be some cache files that won't copy, and that is perfectly fine.

Log,out then back in and see if things are all working fine.
I prefer doing this from outside of Plasma, but the few times I have done this while logged in have been fine, as far as I recall.



Now, as to applications, there is a tool called Aptik you can install which will back up a list of installed applications, and also your PPAs, if you use any.
This will only work on systems using the same version of *buntu, mind you.


As usual, good backups before starting is highly recommended.



Of course, there is always the giant hammer method of using clonezilla or similar tools to fully clone one machine, bit-for-bit, and restoring it to the other one.

[marclar]

Great detail here, thanks.

The good news is that it's the same model laptop (though there's a slight hardware difference in that one has a fingerprint reader).

Kubuntu 19 at work and 18 at home, so I'll have to upgrade that one.

My dotfiles and configs are in git, and my projects are in github. I found some bash snippet to copy the sources.list and I make a list of all the dpkg's.

One potential problem I could see that I have the same username in both places so I'd want to rename the work user before copying it to my home laptop. But if I can't do it in some super-easy automated way (and I'll check out CloneZilla - thanks), it won't be *too* difficult to recreate the user profile at home.