Transfer HDD from one Linux pc to another

[Circlotron]

I want to do a fresh Linux install on my main PC but not disturb it until the last moment. I have a second PC that I can plug the new SSD into and set everything up on that, then hopefully transfer the SSD to the main PC.

The main PC is an i5 with nvidia 660 graphics card and the secondary PC is an i3 with onboard graphics. If I just swap the drive from one to the other I expect it will run, but will Linux sort out the differences and automatically make whatever alterations it needs to do to run optimally? Would it end up being as good as if I installed Linux using the main PC, or would there be some shortcomings?

[magic]

In some distributions drivers for GPUs may come in separate packages, so installing on NVIDIA may not get you AMD drivers and so on.

Another potential issue is initramfs, which needs to be regenerated on new hardware sometimes or the system won't boot. But you will usually also get a "fallback" initramfs which contains lots of drivers and should work just about everywhere.

Generally, hardware is autodetected on every bootup and drivers are loaded automatically, if available. You can generally replace hardware and move disks between machines, it's not Windows

[mag_therm]

You could:
Create users on the new, with exactly same names
Selectively copy wanted dirs in /home/~ over to these users.
Try not to copy ~/.config , .local, .cache ... etc

For applications that were installed in the old system, I would try to re-install using the official installer repos  (apt dnf etc)  if possible.