You can backup you home-directory and add it back into the newly installed OS. Some of the more dedicated distro-hoppers will even have the home-directory on a separate partition, which they don’t overwrite during installation and rather just mount into the new OS.

The home-directory contains all your music, pictures, add-ons and portable software. It also contains your configurations under ~/.config/ and local files of applications under ~/.local/.
After you’ve reinstalled, you won’t have all the same applications installed, but once you reinstall them, they should pick up the configuration from those folders and work as you expect. Sometimes, your new distribution/installation might use different versions of that particular software, so it’s not guaranteed that everything works perfectly, but it does work pretty well.

Okay any time I mention this product I get roasted but I don’t care because I like it. There is a program called aptik and basically it backs up all your settings and home folder and then can be restored if you need to reinstall. https://store.teejeetech.com/product/aptik/

It’s a one time purchase. I bought my copy like maybe almost 10 years ago and still use it. I used to have a script that I would maintain manually for this sort of thing but this is much easier. I also like that it will update strings and stuff for you when going from one version of a distro to another or between distros. You can also easily go in and uncheck things if you don’t want them or only revert certain parts of the backup and not others. it has 100% saved my butt a few times especially where I had some weird config on a piece of software and after a restore it worked just like before. In my opinion this is also a better option than a diskimage because of the customization of the restore and the fact that you can do it I guess my biggest issue with it is it’s not free software which is kind of annoying however it’s just one dude and the license is very bare bones so it’s not like he is trying to get away with anything with this tool.

When I was doing it I started from scratch, you can generally keep your home directory intact between distros though, settings and data stay

A way to distrohop could be a virtual machine. That way you aren’t “sacrificing” your current install.

If you choose to reinstall, try to document all the changes you are doing and why. See if you can automate the changes. That way you can always get back to a desired state with minimal input on your end.

As someone who distrohoped quite a bit, let me give you some advice:

• Try the new distro in a VM first.
• Configure your distro as you want and put all the commands you used in a script to use when you make the switch.
• Ask your self, what do i get from distrohoping? Is it really worth it?
• Create a dotfilles git repo with all of your configs. Create a script to install your dotfiles easily. (Either by copying them to .config or creating symlinks)

Remember that, at the end, linux is linux, remember that you can customize you distro to look exactly like the fancy one you saw.

Honestly, why switch distros? I switch DEs from time to time

I don’t distrohop much these days because I’m happy with where I am. But I actually enjoy having a clean start once in a while; going back and experiencing the defaults for a time helps clarify which customisations are actually really useful and which ones I’m just stuck in a rut with which happens a lot more than I usually expect. Of course I back up all my data/media and move that across, but configurations I like to approach with a clean slate. It’s quite freeing to know that I can just wipe and reinstall my system at any time without much difficulty.