At the time you first install the system do: "yay -Qqe >newinstalls.txt" which will create a list of installed packages. Then later you can do it again but to another file: "yay -Qqe >nowinstalls.txt". Then do: "diff newinstalls.txt nowinstalls.txt" which will give you a list of the differences between the two.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Arch Linux
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aconfmgr may meet your needs. It is billed as a configuration manager for Arch and will track installed packages and changed package files.
I can second this, I use aconfmgr and love it. Especially useful to manage multiple computers (desktop, laptop, old computer doing other things etc).
Though I'm currently planning to rewrite it since it doesn't seem maintained any more, and I want a multi-distro solution (because I also want to use it on my Pis where I run Raspbians). The rewrite will be in Rust, and I'm currently deciding on what configuration language to use. I'm leaning towards rhai (because it seems easy to integrate from the rust side, and I'm not getting too angry at the language when reading the docs for it). Oh and one component for it is already written and published: https://github.com/VorpalBlade/paketkoll is a fast rust replacement for paccheck (that is used internally by aconfmgr to find files that differ).
Guess that will do! Something to log what was installed so i could backtrack instead of formatting ( since i wanted to see what wayland is like, then lets try sway! then some other versioins of wine and so on, i cannot remember what the hell i installed haha )
you could theoretically use something like ansible and manage your stuff there. i dont know if it is really practical on arch and for your use case. theoretically you'd write how your system should be into a playbook and on a fresh install you theoretically just had to run your playbook to get all the Packages and settings you need
I would go with the Arch specific https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aconfmgr-git instead of ansible, since it can save current system state as well. I use it and love it. See another reply on this post for a slightly deeper discussion on it.