Linux

Reinstall? Why?

Create a separate partition for /home and don't format it when reinstalling, so you will keep all your stuff.

There's a distro called NixOS that is created for this purpose. It also has a tool called home manager that will manage your dot files for you. Once you back up like two or three configuration files you can recreate your system (minus any actual data)

When you do this in Arch there's no guarantee you get the same package versions and there's no guarantee everything works

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

heading in a completely different direction that what you were aiming for, but the declarative distros (currently a subset of immutable distros) like NixOS and Guix are trying to solve just this sort of issue – their main focus is on dealing with development environments but a lot of people have been enjoying them on desktop environments as well

ex. with NixOS, your entire system configuration is stored in one master config file /etc/nixos/configuration.nix (that you can optionally keep synced with git) – the main config can be modularized (ie. break out the hardware definitions into its own include so you can still use the master config on both desktop and laptop) – and Nix has been making big strides with Home Manager, their own way of being able to collect and define all of your home directory config files and theming

currently, NixOS is not for the faint-of-heart, documentation (both quality and lack of) regularly gets critiqued – NixOS and Nix package manager are all configured in the Nix language, a functional language used nowhere else

Guix comes out of the GNU project so dealing with proprietary drivers is harder than it needs to be – Guix is configured in Guile Scheme

mkstage4 is exactly for this. It's basically just a wrapper for tar which excludes unneeded directories for you already.

There is a pacman command that prints the list of all packages installed by users. I don't remenber the command sorry but you'll find that here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks

Its probably "pacman -Qe".

Then it should be easy to create a script that install all that automaticcally. If your are cautious you should have a backup of your home anyway on some storage device .

You could likely use dd or clonezilla to create a duplicate of your boot drive and boot your laptop right from that, but that’s not quite what you’re after.

There are some distros lately that use a declarative config file to set the whole thing up that I think is much more what you have in mind. The big ones that come up a lot are nixOS and Fedora Silverblue. Maybe one of those systems would be to your liking.

Reinstalling is Windows-user logic. Also why start with Arch Linux of all distros.

I don't know by heart if it's able to do your bidding, but perhaps it's worth checking out penguins-eggs. I guess the following would be its elevator pitch:

"penguins-eggs is a console tool, under continuous development, that allows you to remaster your system and redistribute it as live images on usb sticks or via PXE.

The default behavior is total removal of the system's data and users, but it is also possible to remaster the system including the data and accounts of present users, using flag --clone. It is also possible to keep the users and files present under an encrypted LUKS file within the same resulting iso file, flag --cryptedclone.

You can easily install the resulting live system with the calamares installer or the internal TUI krill installer."

Usually with most Linux distributions you can just make a tarball of the entire system (don't forget the p to preserve ownership,...) and unpack it to a new partition, install the boot loader again and it should work on a new system, as long as the kernel does work with the hardware on the new system. Alternatively you can reinstall and keep your home directory to keep all your user config.

So is this possible? and if yes, how should I go about this? did someone make a tool for this already? Or(!) can I burn it to a flash and the drivers will correct themselves/I’ll deal with them later?

I think this is where a few respondents got the impression you are looking at this like a Windows install. It is not. All of the drivers, minus proprietary (also called non-free) drivers (i.e., Nvidia, file format support, etc), are already included in the installation. On laptops, this can get weird with some of the laptop-specific hardware, but most of it works out of the box most of the time. Exceptions are old WinTel-era wireless and networking cards which needed a terrible driver wrapper, but has long since fallen out of favor. Thankfully!

Let's do the Time-shift again!!!

Timeshift

I'm not an expert in Linux, but I've been using it for more than 20 years. I used to be plagued by this issue, but since online services have matured, I've got most of my stuff synced up. That, and my NAS and an external drive for backups. I do have a few thoughts, though.

One, I believe you can simply copy your /home directory and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install. This strikes me as a limiting option, as it doesn't allow you to distro hop, at least not seamlessly. Also, get an external drive for backups. I use Deja Dup for simple, easy backups and restorations.

Two, I would suggest you investigate either Fedora (https://getfedora.org) or Pop_OS! (https://pop.system76.com/) as an alternative. Fedora is based on Red Hat, which is very mature, but strikes a nice balance between the latest software and reliability. Pop_OS! is Debian-based, which is also a very well matured OS, though System76 has made some major improvements. I use their Pop Shell extension for GNOME on Fedora 39 for window tiling, easily the best I've used on any Linux distro. Regardless, almost any other distro should be easier to get going over Arch. Sorry, Arch users ;)

Three, if you really don't want to leave Arch, check out Manjaro. It's Arch-based, but it's quite a bit easier to set up.

Four, if you'd still like to try borking things, but without facing consequences, I'd set up a local VM using Boxes for GNOME or VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). That way you can test stuff without risking your functional system. Boxes is better, IMO, since it can install distros from the app itself. The list has at least 100 distros of all types to choose from, including Haiku and FreeBSD. It would be good, however, if you have at least 16GBs of RAM, though I generally run VMs with 4GBs of RAM, Linux can run fine with 2GBs.

I hope that helps :)

Perhaps add config files to a git repo somewhere. Then you will have a copy and can sync in changes. Keep it private though

I have done something similar following this post - loads of others have created similar scripted installers for Arch for their specific use cases and this guide takes it one step further with custom arch meta packages that hold deps and system wide config.

You can also do similar things with tools like ansible or saltstack or similar tools. Though these all take the approach of define your configs and system to automate the setting up of a system approach rather than the backup or clone an existing system. So are more effort initially but are able to keep multiple system in sync with system configs with far less effort then trying to create a backup/restore system for organically created configs.

that wouldn’t work (I think) because my laptop has vastly different hardware

Should not matter, you can install all the packages all your system need - such as both nvidia, amd and intel graphics drivers and the kernel will only load the ones for the hardware you have booted with. Or if you really need different configs or packages for different systems the various approaches have ways to do that.