Time: How to Respond to 'How Are You?' When You're Not OK
From my point of view, if the difference between what about and how about in general is slight, the difference between what about you and how about you is even slighter. They are certainly interchangeable, as you mentioned, but I would go so far as to say that their common usages are semantically indistinguishable. In point of usage, Ngrams shows a slight preference for What about you: COCA ...
meaning - "What about you?" versus "How about you?" - English Language ...
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In my experience as a native speaker in the Middle Atlantic region, there is a slight difference. "How are you?" is a bland greeting for someone you haven't seen for a while, while "How are you doing?" spoken in full (as opposed to being shortened to "Howyadoin?") may be an actual inquiry. The latter is more common when there is some expectation that the subject might not be doing well. For ...
Some of my colleagues have argued that when a statement/question uses the work "how", the reader expects to get a list of solutions. Examples: "How could world hunger be solved?" "How can a
The meaning of "how" in questions - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
"How can I" implies "How am I able to" or "How would I be able to", which is a request for information explaining possibility, the answer to which would usually contain instruction. It is semantically similar to "How do I", which is on its face a request for instruction. So, like Robusto said, they're basically interchangeable; they both sound right in virtually all questions of this type ...