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This is primarily a sanity check before installing the latest openSUSE on my parents’ computer.

To make sure that they can continue where they left off, is it a simple case of using the -d and -M flags to reuse the old home dir?

useradd -u previous-uid -d old-home -M user-name

There aren't any particular gotchas that I need to look out for? (have backups, etc. sorted already).  I am primarily checking this will be fine (or otherwise) in relation to file permissions, as it would be reusing the same UID from a different install.

Further to Julie Pelletier’s comment, when looking for config files, the main things I see are Libre Office, kde and backup software installed with zypper, and Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird installed directly. While this gave me more to think about, it's not my primary focus with this question.

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'
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Guy
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    How can we evaluate the impact of using old personal settings (not detailed) on an unknown list of programs? Try it and check every program they need to make sure they work OK and if not, address the specific issues. – Julie Pelletier Dec 30 '16 at 17:31
  • You can keep old home directory as backup but You cant use same username.Note : home directory should have own partition not same partition with / partition. – supriady Dec 30 '16 at 17:37
  • Julie, looking at it, there isn't a huge amount of dotfiles that aren't related to stuff I've done. – Guy Dec 30 '16 at 17:41
  • supriady, /home already is in its own partition. Why couldn't the username be the same? not that it matters, mind.. – Guy Dec 30 '16 at 17:50
  • supriady's point is probably related to the user id and group id which may likely be different. Files (directory entries) contain those IDs and not the respective names. – Julie Pelletier Dec 30 '16 at 17:55
  • oh, thats why I was using the -u flag, to set the uid the same as this install. Even if any useful files are just copied over to a new home directory, it'll give the right permissions then. – Guy Dec 30 '16 at 18:01
  • When you created username during the installation and created home directory for you automatically.You can create username manually without created home directory. – supriady Dec 30 '16 at 18:18

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If they have one account that should be enough, but if each of your parents have their own login, you might want to check that the groups are similar set up, especially if they are sharing files and using group permissions to read and write in some shared directory. You can add a group with groupadd and use usermod to add such a group to the accounts created by useradd (if you first do the groupadd you can also specify the group as an option to useradd)

Anthon
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