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?
Just to add a bit more to this for the newbies who are using Arch (god help you).
Will write this list to a file, run without the ‘> packages.txt’ if you just want to see the output and;
Will install all of the needed (i.e. not installed) packages from that list.
If you use
-Qeq, you should be able to skip the awk part of the command.TIL
Looks like I gave up on RTFM and turned to awk too early.
This is incredibly useful, sucks that I’ll forget this is a thing by the time I need it.
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.
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.