I've been thinking about moving from Kubuntu to Arch. I've already set up the Arch system and installed KDE, but I was unsure if it were possible to migrate all my KDE settings across. I'm aware of ~/.kde in Kubuntu vs. ~/.kde4 in Arch, but would that be the only difference? Is it okay to just copy the entire directory across, should I do a partial copy, or is any kind of copy too dangerous?

I guess the "cleanest" way would be to manually migrate the settings. e.g. take 50 screenshots in Kubuntu, then copy those manually. Alternatively, I was considering setting up a virtual Kubuntu session, copying my home directory over, and manually syncing them there.

I've migrated my entire /home from distro to distro (must be at least twenty now?), from computer to computer and even sync parts of it between desktop and laptop. Of course you can also only copy ~/.kde (plus ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird if applicable) over, up to you really...

Oh great to know. I was just going to give it a try, but I wasn't really sure whether something would break a few months down the track. I guess KDE is probably robust enough anyway to recover.

This didn't work so well, it seems. I tried migrating just ~/.kde/share, then the whole of ~/.kde, but neither really worked. In both cases, my activites were lost, as were the "desktop" widgets.

Even worse, were some window problems. For example, I would try and launch Firefox, and the taskbar would show a window appearing somewhere, but I couldn't find it. (Perhaps that was because I had window rules assigned.) Similarly, Konquerer had problems with accepting enter in the search bar. If I deleted ~/kde4, then both worked fine.

Are there other directories that I should transfer?

try ~/.local/share as well

Unfortunately that didn't help either. One other potential issue is that I have a different hostname in my new system. Some of the files (mostly symlinks?) seem to specify the hostname. e.g. ~/.kde/cache-sparhawk-XPS-17 is now ~/.kde4/cache-arch. I didn't have an exhaustive look through, but just did a merge instead. Still, I would have thought this might have worked.

Are these the only two directories that KDE would write config to? I guess I could just try writing all dot files from the entire home directory. Or change the hostname.

You did rename ~/.kde to ~/.kde4? If you didn't, delete your Arch home and try again...

Yes, I renamed ~/.kde to ~/.kde4 . I just tried changing the new distro's hostname to match the old, and that didn't help. I can see some KDE settings getting transferred, but not the activities. Conceivably that's where all the problems stem from.

Okay, never having played a lot with activities I'm not sure what else to do. You have copied the whole home over?

Otherwise wait for someone more knowledgeable in activities to add their tuppence...

the symbolic links you refer to are the cache and temp folders KDE (located in ~/.kde4) ? if you remove them, preferably with KDE not running, they should regenerate with the proper link

you'd best off copying the whole ~/ if possible as there are some files in ~/.local/share and ~/.config (such as menu items, autostart apps, mime types and Akonadi files).

Excellent! Copying the whole of ~ seems to have worked. There are a few issues, such as some plasmoids missing (those installed via "Get new widgets"). However, that's relatively easy to reinstall manually. Everything else seems to have installed quite well.

Thanks toad and google01103 for the help!