Thank you for the detailed response! Yes, the what data and how to not create conflicts has been troubling me the most.
I think I might first narrow it down with test VMs first, to skip the transfer part, before I actually use it “in production“.
It has been asked on the forum. Idk if they will consider implementing some type of notification for critical issues on the OS itself. Edit: they are working on a solution
If you dont want to miss future announcements:
The setup process isn’t really much different from other distros, quite easy. It’s documented here. If it’s still too intimidating for you, you could always do a test run in a virtual machine first, there is even an image that you can select at the bottom of the download menu on the website for virtual machines.
The nice thing is that, if you have some kind of special hardware (e.g. certain laptops, nvidia gpu…) you only need to select it the downloading menu and then you are all set with the special tweaks that the hardware requires provided by the community.
After the initial installation it’s an even better experience than other distros I have used. It gives you a first time portal, where you can choose additional applications that you would like installed. If you get your application via flatpak then you are all setup. If you need other applications not available in flathub, you will have to do some further reading in the documentation, it’s all explained there.
Great news!