Can’t you export your library / media settings and only have to change file paths or mnt points?

I’m adding debian to the drive on a ten plus year old laptop as we speak. It’s taking forever because I have to do part of it manually but usually it takes less than an hour and is mostly idiot proof (my current project is on its 3rd week so I am just a special kind of idiot) but a small lightweight distro alongside the windows partition is an easy way to give old hardware new life without migrating data.