What I do is create a /data partition that holds all my files and any program that didn't come with the distro (including my /home directory and a backup of the current /etc). I then backup the /data directory, do a clean installation, and set the /data directory to mount automatically. Presto! A clean installation with clean config files *and* all my old files to use as needed.
Isn't /opt for packages that didn't come with the distro?
These days Qt, Mozilla, KDE and Gnome are there by default so using /opt would defeat my purpose. I want to keep my data and programs completely separated from the distro files. I suppose I could mount my directory in /opt instead of / but, since it also contains data files and backups of system configuration files, that doesn't seem like the right place to me either. I don't have a Linux/unix background and honestly I've never been too fond of some parts of the Linux directory design. I see very good reasons to keep config, log, system, lib, and devices in their own directories, but I've struggled to understand the reasoning behind keeping data files in places like /var/lib/mysql for example. I would have thought it makes more sense to have a directory specifically for application data that you might want to have on mirrored disks and backup often, rather than keep data in a directory that contains log, spool and other system files. I'm sure there's a reason it's this way, but it escapes me. Bedtime. Later... Jeff