Kernel boot logs aren’t well disciplined to be careful about what is an error or not. Sometimes it’s just checking for the existence of hardware and reports the error it gets if it doesn’t exist.
Yeah - the home directory in Linux pre-dates the windows Users directory by a long time. You’ll see the multi-user nature of your OS exposed much more in Linux than you will in Windows.
Every user will have a /home/username directory on Linux (often referenced by “~” or by the environment variable “$HOME”). By default this is the only directory that user will have any permissions to create things (with some exceptions like /tmp which is used for temporary file creation - but nothing long-term). So all of your configuration, user-created files, etc. will be created there.
Configurations are often stored in ‘dot-files’ or in directories that begin with a period. These are “hidden” by default with most file-browsing tools (it’s just a tradition - there’s nothing otherwise special about files or directories that begin with a period). So you’ll have a .bashrc which is the script that runs when you start a bash shell for example. Or .local which is where you will find a lot of application configurations these days.
So if you copy /home/username somewhere you will copy all of your configurations.
Some applications will install there as well. Steam, for example, will install your programs under $HOME/.steam.
Things you install “system-wide” will be installed to /usr/bin or /bin. This will typically be things that you use a package manager to install. So the steam application may be /usr/bin/steam but then all of its configurations, installed apps, etc. go in your home dir.
If you’re curious where a command lives you can use which cmd or type cmd from the command-line and it will show you (something I often wish Windows had).
NOTE: There are exceptions to everything I’ve said above. But those are the “general” guidelines. In short - if you installed it without needing root permissions it’s likely somewhere in $HOME.
SSH is used to connect. Ownership, symlinks, etc. are preserved. Add more “excludes” to filter out more directories. Do your first run without " delete" to make sure things are going where you want.
If you want “backups” I would suggest something more sophisticated. But for just cloning this is the way.
the “year of the Linux computer” will never happen.
It won’t, that’s fine. People who don’t want to lean anything about computers use iOS and Android now. And that’s fine. I never want Linux distros to become like that.
It’s only really an option for GUI applications which I intend to launch from a GUI which is a real turn-off as a long-time CLI user. I often want to run something like gimp file.ext from the CLI but can’t (easily) with a flatpak.
I also find the permission system gets in the way quite frequently as well. Like I was using some graphics program from a flatpak (I forget which - rawtherapee or maybe digikam) and it could only see certain directories. I get the security restrictions but it was a bit of hoop-jumping to try to figure out how to get that to stop, and in the end I just installed the snap…