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I have decided to try out Linux Mint instead of the horrible Ubuntu Unity experince.

I have a separate partition for my /home folder, which I'd like to preserve of course. So I'm curious: is it possible for me to install the 64bit version of Mint without user dotfiles making trouble? More specifically, will it matter that the new OS is 64-bit? My instinct tells me - no, a config file is a config file, but I thought it would be better to check here, I simply don't want to lose all the app settings.

A more general question would be, will the user dotfiles cause any problem for Mint, regardless of bit-ness? Has this been tried by someone?

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Generally speaking, user configuration files don't care about your architecture. I don't know of any exception in any current popular application. Of course, I can't exclude some weird program that stores binary data differently on x64 and amd64, but I wouldn't bet on you having any.

You can share dot files between different distributions; there's nothing specific about your distribution in them. What can be problematic sometimes is sharing dot files between different versions of a program. However, it's almost always the case that your dot files keep working as long as you're moving forward — replacing a program by a later version of that program. It's only going back that fails, and then what will happen is that the older version might completely ignore your settings, or even fail to start until you move them out of the way. There aren't many programs that have trouble that way, but there are popular programs that do have trouble, such as Firefox.

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  • Well, I installed it, no trouble so far. We'll see what happens when wife comes back and starts using it on daily basis :) Thanks for your answer!
    – dr Hannibal Lecter
    Nov 20, 2011 at 10:34

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