That's a good question. Kinoite does not version some directories, such as your home directory or /etc. Rebasing and then reverting the rebase will create some clutter. What I'd suggest is to use some utility to version your files, perform a backup before doing the rebase or snapshot your home directory using the builtin snapshot functionality of btrfs. Maybe something like restic would work for this case.

This is the main reason I don't generally rebase on anything except versions I intend to stay on if things work well. Yes, you'll keep your files and folders, but the updated software will write to them, and those will stay there too.

For example, new versions of Firefox might make modifications to your profile directory that might not work in earlier versions of Firefox. So if your rebase gives you a newer version, than reverting will break your Firefox profile.

(Now with Firefox specifically this isn't usually a problem, since even older OS releases will have the latest Firefox versions, and Firefox itself is pretty stable too, but the concept could also apply to other software.)

I installed kinoite on my laptop. Rebased to silverblue for a while to try out gnome, rebased to kinoite rawhide to check out kde plasma 6, then back to kinoite 39. I think a few minor settings had to be redone, but no real issues.

Home is mutable, and the mess that at least KDE does (not sure about GNOME) make removing its traces really hard.

I should write a script to remove all traces of KDE on a system, or to back everything up and import it etc.

Find me on Github if you want to help collect all the directories and files.

Its a total mess and can cause a ton of issues. The easy way to test DEs is to use a separate user account per Desktop. Lol.

Did it, to bazzite, pretty painless. Yup, your config is the same. Immutable is indeed immutable.