Earlier this year, I built a new PC and it’s running Ubuntu. I’ve been installing various apps and configuring them since then. Now, I realize I don’t have any way of knowing what I would want to reinstall, if I (for instance) lost this drive somehow.

How do you keep track of what you’ve installed/ your favorite apps?

Separately, how can I backup the configurations I’m using right now.

Thanks!

  • Bankenstein@feddit.deEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    Move all your heavily modified config files into a git repository and host it somewhere. Then symlink all your config files to where they should be with ln -s ~/.config/whatever ~/gitrepo/whatever. That’s how you preserve your important configs.

    You can easily get a list of your installed packages (which you can keep in your repository) with apt list --installed > packages.txt. You can then format that list to one you can install from with sed -e "s-/.*$--" <packages.txt (or something, i don’t have apt, can’t test it fully).

    In fact, if someone here is more familiar with apt, please find a way to filter out packages that were not explicitly installed and reply to this comment with your solution.

    • sibloure@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      This combined with stow command makes it very simple to “install” your system configuration on a new machine.