Glad to hear it. Good luck with your computer!

Oh, and make sure that when you’re running opensuse’s installer that you tell it to NOT format your “universal” home partition. And just to be safe, backup your data somewhere else before doing anything!

Sounds like you’ve got it right. As long as you tell opensuse to mount your existing home directory somewhere besides /home you’ll be fine. Even if you do mount it at /home it won’t delete or overwrite it, you’ll just get lots of conflicts with the “foreign” pre-existing configuration files. So yeah, mount it somewhere like /mnt/home and opensuse will leave it alone and make its own /home directory on its own partition, and then you can symlink to your existing mounted partition.

As for grub, it depends on how you do it. If you go with the defaults you’ll probably overwrite kubuntu’s grub with opensuse’s grub. If so, opensuse will probably detect your kubuntu installation and make an entry for kubuntu. Especially if you’re not planning on keeping kubuntu around long-term this’d be the way to go. It’ll work if you want to keep kubuntu as well, but if you don’t want to keep kubuntu around definitely go with this.

Alternately, you could tell opensuse to not install grub when you install it. This would leave kubuntu’s grub installed and in charge, and then you’d go back into kubuntu and regenerate grub’s configuration with the update-grub command and kubuntu’s grub will detect your new opensuse install and add a menu entry for opensuse. This will keep your boot experience the same except for your new opensuse option, but you’ll have to keep kubuntu around since it’s still in charge of your boot menu.

Regardless of which option you choose, if you keep both operating systems installed you’ll likely have to go into the os in charge of grub and manually update grub every time you install a new kernel in the os that isn’t in charge of grub. It’s not hard, but it is another thing to remember.

Yeah, But if I understand correctly that’s how you’ve already got it set up: your /home is on your hdd. Once you have your new ssd installed and your partitions set for opensuse / and your games partition, use rsync to copy your games over to their new partition and mount it wherever you like. Make sure to verify that they all copied over correctly and work as expected before deleting them from your home partition.

Once you’ve got your new ssd installed, your new OS on it, and your games transferred to their new partition, mount your home partition on opensuse somewhere that’s not /home itself…I like /mnt/home, but it doesn’t really matter. Make your symlinks to your “content” folders (~/Documents, ~/Music, etc.), and you’re golden. Likewise, mount your new games partition somewhere (perhaps /mnt/games) and symlink it as well to wherever makes sense for your purposes.

You can then go back to Kubuntu and move the mountpoint for your home partition, recreate a home directory for kubuntu (since you moved the mountpoint it will no longer have a /home directory), and make your symlinks like you did for opensuse. You don’t have to, though, unless you want to…having your home partition at /home on Kubuntu and /mnt/home on opensuse won’t break anything or matter to either OS, but consistency is nice and can make it easier for you as the user.

One last thing: make sure your users and groups match up between your OSs so each has permission to see your shared home directories. If your username is “murdoc” and your UUID is 1000 on Kubuntu, make sure that they’re the same on opensuse. Likewise, make sure your user’s primary group ID matches between your OSes as well. Use usermod and groupmod if necessary, but hopefully opensuse lets you specify a UUID when you set up your new user.

You can share your /home partition directly, but you’ll likely find problems with things like theming and other configurations when you do. This is because you’re not only sharing the stuff you want, like ~/Documents and such, but also all of the hidden configuration directories like ~/.local as well. While most every distro uses the same visible directories, they are less likely to store their config files in the same places as others.

To get around this, I mount my “universal” home directory somewhere other than /home, e.g. /mnt/home instead. Then I symlink the folders that I care about to each distro’s /home directory, e.g ln -s /mnt/home//Music ~/ . It works across all Linux distros as well as other Unices (as long as they can read the filesystem that you put your universal /home on…ZFS is great for this). I’ve used this successfully to share my ~/* directories between Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS installs at one time or another. But it still lets each distro or OS have its own configurations without interfering with the other stuff you’re multibooting with it.

Because Chromium and its derivatives suck. Is it really too much to ask for a traditional menu bar rather than a stupid hamburger menu?

I’ve never tried Bedrock myself, but was intrigued enough when I learned about it to read up. (So take my words with a huge grain of salt.) I believe that you have it right in your first point: you can run a kernel and drivers from, say, Debian stable while running cutting-edge rolling release userland applications from, say, Arch. And if you want a few slower-moving applications you can get those from, say, Ubuntu while still running the rest of your system as Debian and Arch. And if you need something really obscure that you can only find in a weird Gentoo overlay…

As to your second point, yeah, you can go with SystemD from wherever or OpenRC from Gentoo or Runit from Void or whatever else you want.

But really, I suggest you try out Bedrock in a VM and find out for yourself. If it works like you want it to, then go to town on your bare-metal install (after backing it up first, of course!).

Mixxx is the only Linux-native DJ software that I know of, but it’s still amazing. If it’s missing featutes compared with Serato or Recordbox I’m not good enough to miss them yet, and the features it doea have are damn impressive.

Likewise, Inkscape and Gimp are both great. I know that Gimp takes a lot of heat for not being as “good” as Photoshop, but it’s just different. The few times I’ve tried Photoshop were as painful to me as Gimp seems to be for others. And since I don’t need the CMYK functionality that Gimp is missing, I’m happy with Gimp.

LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but using anything else for documents is like stone knives and bearskins in comparison.

First off, I take issue with the idea that hobbies are pointless. If doing something makes you happy, that’s worth a lot in my book: whether that hobby is playing golf or collecting stamps or using a non-mainstream distro.

To the point: for me, Gentoo has a purpose in that it’s the easiest distro for me to maintain. Yeah, I had to negotiate the learning curve, but now that I have I know how to keep my install running and fix things when they break. Before my last computer died I was running the same install for 9 years straight, and my current install on my “new” computer is five years old. I never got that feeling of “system mastery” with Ubuntu or Fedora.

So there’s your purpose: it works better for some people than other distros. Everybody has their own preferences and values, and Gentoo matches those for some. It may not be your cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean that everybody should just use what you consider to be a “useful” distro.

Try all three. It’s not like it costs anything, and they’re all just a click or one-liner away. Try them all and see what works best for you.

That said, I’ll go with Mate any day of the week.

Back before I felt comfortable taking my expensive smartphones running with me for the GPS purposes, I’d manually enter my running routes into RunKeeper. I don’t know if they still use it, but back then their mapping was powered by OpenStreetMap. I’d add in stuff like sidewalks and trails that weren’t on the map yet to make my manual entries easier. I liked doing this–it was kind of fun and I felt good contributing my knowledge of my local unimportant suburb to the world.

I’ve been surprised at how much is already on there, though. Out of curiosity I went to look at the map for my mom’s hometown of ~500 people in the middle of nowhere and found it surprisingly complete.

I still like OpenStreetMap, but don’t use it as much anymore. I wish there was a navigation app that used OSM data and was able to give me audio cues (e.g. “turn left at the next exit”), because that’s 99% of my map use these days. (And if there is one that I don’t know about, please let me know!)

Most of the roads in Ireland, at least for my 'Murrican sensibilities. My wife and I took our honeymoon in Ireland and rented a car to get around. Aside from driving on the opposite side of the road, we were unprepared for how narrow all but the main highways were. The typical road there is comparable to a small country road here, is often lined with hedges right up to the edges, and often lacks a center line. The sheer terror of going past a large truck going the opposite way on one of those for the first time was very, very memorable. We eventually got used to it, but that first day or two of driving was definitely white-knuckled.