What is the cleanest way to upgrade Fedora and also my individual installs while keeping /home?

"As for updating there is a pretty good guide in the Fedora wiki. The procedure works reasonably well when you go in small version steps. And updates should not need to touch /home/ anyway.

If instead you just need to repeatedly install a bunch of the same software on different machines, you can just note the list of packages in a textfile once and then feed that to yum when you set up a machine:

$ cat fav_packages.txt
ipython
python-matplotlib
texlive-latex
pdb

$ yum install `cat fav_packages.txt`

This way you will only get what you really want. Would you feed it the full list of installed packages instead you might pull in a lot of dependencies that might not be needed anymore."