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Method to save your favorite Linux apps for reinstall (lemmy.today)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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20+ years ago, Lindows had a great app store that let you create an "aisle" of your favorite apps so if/when you'd reinstall your OS, instead of searching and installing all your apps one-by-one, you'd just go to your aisle, click "install all" and boom.

Is there anything that exists like that today?

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[–] 18 points 1 year ago (9 children)

For Arch you run pacman -Qe which lists all installed packages that were not installed as a dependency. I output that to a location via golang script which is monitored by the pCloud client for automatic backup along with a lot of other configs from $HOME/.config. I then have a systemd service that fires the script and a timer to kick off that service periodically.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Just to add a bit more to this for the newbies who are using Arch (god help you).

    pacman -Qe | awk '{print $1}' > packages.txt

    Will write this list to a file, run without the '> packages.txt' if you just want to see the output and;

    sudo pacman -S --needed - < packages.txt

    Will install all of the needed (i.e. not installed) packages from that list.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just remember that you can easily generate a list of all explicitly installed packages. You'll figure out how exactly when you end up needing it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    This is how I do it. I'll see something and think 'hmm, interesting' and completely forget any of the details but I'll remember vaguely that something exists then I can search for it.

    Language models are pretty good at solving the 'I think I remember something that does this specific thing but don't know where to look' kinds of problems (don't just blindly run LLM generated commands kids). Then once you have a lead, traditional searching is much easier.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    This is the way.

    On a related note, would you recommend restoring an entire home directory (including the dot files and all the dot directories) once I reinstall all the packages after a fresh install? Would it basically replicate my restored setup or would there be random issues that emerge? I'm thinking particular system settings related to kde/gnome settings, but others I might not be aware of.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For me, I tend to focus on specific directories I know I'd need data from (or that will just be a hassle to rewrite config for). I have a scripts folder that gets backed up, Books, .mozilla, etc. A lot of things I just know I won't need like .cache. That folder is 7GB and mostly just the cache from yay needing to be cleared out.

    I don't backup my entire home directory because I'm worried ACLs may change or other little issues that will take more time than its worth to correct. That said, you could. You worried about something like that, you could pull the existing ACLs: find ~/ -type f -exec getfacl --absolute-names {} + > home_acls_backup.txt and then restore them: setfacl --restore=home_acls_backup.txt

    I haven't really used KDE much, but I know it has a theme data in .local/share that you'd want (and probably the .cache folder as well). GNOME keeps theme data in .themes, .icons, .fonts. They might just be defaults, but if you have anything custom, you'd want those folders too.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thank you for your reply, this is helpful to know.

    That's what I currently do as well, I just backup particular .config subfolders and other directories. I'll probably continue to avoid just raw transferring an entire home directory on a new install.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    One other thing I didn't mention is it depends on the backup tool you use. Not all of them are filesystem aware. What that means is if you have hardlinks present those will not be preserved.

    That can be important to remember as it will bork things down the road with the restoring. If you aren't familiar with linking: Hard links point to actual data (think of it like a pointer in C). Soft links (symbolic) point to file path.

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