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?
You can install all apps through the command line. Just write a shellscript with all the commands and run it when you’re doing your reinstall.
And just update it with every package install and uninstall, on every device, forever.
dpkg --get-selections > package_list.txtOr just generate a list before you reinstall. Other distros have similar commands.
Does that get you a list of only the manually installed packages, or also include things that were automatically installed as part of something else?
It does it if you do it right after the OS installation then whenever you plan to move on and diff the two.
As far as I know, it includes all installed packages, so the latter.
Should only show you the packages that you’ve explicitly installed (i.e. were not installed as dependencies).
If you installed meta packages (say, KDE Plasma) then it’ll mark each component of that install as manually installed.
Will mark the meta packages as auto instead of manual.
You’re correct. All packages installed via dpkg/apt are on that list. What isn’t included are appimages, flatpacks, snaps and other non-dpkg software if you happen to have any.
Is there a nice way to check if something is already installed or do you just install it again and that just skips already installed stuff?
It skips already installed stuff.