That’s the question.
Of course you can. Same as when I used my pre-existing /home from an old Arch install in Debian, then transferred to Ubuntu, then transferred here to this CachyOS install. For the most part everything should work just fine, except sometimes you’ll have a shortcut or link to a program that isn’t installed. Just install whatever programs and usually the old dot files already have the configuration, so things just come back up.
what about updating the os with an old /home directory made with the past version?
I should mention, I use a /home partition to achieve this. If you don’t have a partition you can try moving the files with rsync or something to a partition you intend to keep.
thank you for you response @Jeoshua !