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I am looking into migrating from kubuntu 14.04 which has KDE 4 to a newer version which has Plasma and Framworks 5.

My previous experience is that it is no good to copy all user configuration files in ~/.kde/ and ~/.local/. In some cases this seems to give unexpected behavior of applications. On the other hand there are many configuration intense applications for which I successfully migrated them in the past. In some cases I would want to avoid to copy them because I know that they cannot be consistently reused (e.g. desktop scheme settings). In other cases I would want to migrate the settings but do not know where they are stored (e.g. system wide shortcuts).

Since many users will want to copy their configuration to save time, it would be good to share a whitelist for configuration files and application data which can rather safely be copied. Is there any such list to start from?

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I don't know of a whitelist, but based on my experience in the past with similar types of situations, if you can't find a whitelist, I would copy all of your config files to a different directory, such as old_config. Then, when you start an application and it isn't configured the way you like, copy the file for just that application from old_config to the real config file location and see if it works. This allows you to get the config files you need on a case-by-case basis. I've used this strategy, for example, on a new linux computer with configuration files in my home directory (.emacs, .vimrc, .bashrc, .mozilla, .dropbox, .purple, etc)

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  • This is what I am usually doing. For many dot files a kubuntu/ubuntu version change will indeed be irrelevant because there is only a minor or no version change of the applications they configure. The ones you mentioned, I would copy immediately because I don't expect any trouble. On the other hand, especially for kde applications, it is particularly tempting to copy them (because they have plenty of options) but the risk to introduce errors is much higher and problems would often not pop up immediately.
    – highsciguy
    Apr 18, 2015 at 23:10

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