FOSS is a two sided coin: it’s awesome that anyone with an interest can continue a project when the original maintainers disperse, but man you have to watch your software carefully for the most actively maintained forks. Thats happened to me on a bunch of apps: Breezy Weather, Paperless-ngx, Cromite, Ironfox, Simple Calendar and on and on 😂. It takes time, but it’s worth it.
I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.