Try installing some programs using the Nix package manager. It lets you declare a list of packages in a flake.nix file and then it'll download and update them for you automatically. And if you use git to keep track of the changes to flake.nix, you can easily undo changes if you screw something up.

Home Manager does the same thing but for your app's config files (so you can easily back up and synchronize them)

Both of these make getting set up after a fresh reinstallation much faster! (There's also "NixOS" which is an entire operating system that uses Nix for configuring the whole operating system but I wouldn't recommend that until you've tried "Nix" first)