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?
For me the config management aspect of home-manager is mostly useless. It takes a lot more work to set it up, looks far uglier, and you need to maintain it because parameters change over time. Saving dotfiles in a repo, and symlinking them on install is simply easier.
The only two scenarios where it’s actually useful is when you have slightly different configs for different devices, and when the program doesn’t support dotfiles. A pretty cool example I’ve seen for the second one is managing Firefox customisations (settings, plugins, additional CSS), but I’m only disabling horizontal tabs so it’s not worth it for me.