imo, the best solution for this is easily NixOS
explicit reproducible system configuration

NixOS

You should have a look at NixOS. It’s a Linux distro where you declare the whole system in configuration like files, in a language called Nix (hence NixOS), then you run a command and that gets resolved into your system.

It takes a long time to setup the first time, but it’s a breeze when you need to reinstall, and you will never need to reinstall as every boot is a fresh copy of the system you declared.

There’s also a thing called home-manager which uses the Nix language to declare your home configuration. That part can be used in any other Linux by installing the home-manager package.

You can declare your OS in a way that the home part is portable for machines running other systems. I do that, then my machines are very easy to declare, and with some groups for things like Base (Terminal, prompt, some things I expect to have on every system like Python, nvim fully configured, etc), Gaming (Steam mostly), UI (Sway, many GUI things I use like browser with extensions, etc) I can add configs for a new machine in instants depending on what I expected for it, and if I ever want to convert my “Steam machine” into a desktop it’s just a couple line changes, regenerate the config and it’s exactly the same as my laptop.

Honestly I don’t think Nix is for everyone, but it’s a very niche thing that works extremely well for what it sets up to do, and if you’re in the target audience it’s a game changer.

+1 for ansible

This is why we put /home on a separate partition for reuse on new installs. It saves your users’ files. Your steam, WM, Firefox config, even document files are already basically portable between installs.

And in those files, we may as well put a bash script that does your pacman/apt/dnf/emerge/yay for the everything. This could be easy like with Gentoo or a PITA like with Debian to just scrape from the system right before migration.

Firefox is weird when you hop between distros. Some distros use the LTS (long term stable) version, others use the normal Stable branch… Does Debian still maintain an IceWeasel fork of Firefox? This means you may want to manually copy a folder to a backup location to manually slot it in after the distro-hop. Either way, you want to download a popular privacy-focused user.js file from Github ;)

There’s always pyinfra.

However. The easiest solution is probably a custom shell script that checks which OS it is and does different things based on that. It doesn’t have to pretty as long as it works for you.

Edit: Why do you keep reinstalling your operating system?

I think the most optimal way of doing this would be a self-made shell script that expresses your preferences. You could then run it from whatever live-environment you choose and the result would be a familiar setup. The /home directory being on a separate partition from the rest is useful for preserving large-quantities of user-data.

I’ve been impressed with the capacity of microSD cards. The idea of mounting /home to a microSD card and having a materially-portable home has been a novelty I’ve so far resisted.

GuixSD is another distro that allows you to keep a reproducible config file from which reinstall everything from base to apps to dotfiles.

The con is that it can feel a bit alien compared to other distros.

There are communities on Lemmy about it:

• !guix@lemmy.ml
• !guix@infosec.pub
• !guix@lemmy.world

guix is pretty useful. You can install it on top of any distro, feed it the declaration of your desired set-up and it will reproduce it everytime

I think the Archinstall script (that is part of the official Arch iso) can save the configuration, to reinstall with same setup again. But it does not go into details like your Firefox environment. Its there to setup the basic installation and eventually additional packages.

I had found myself reinstalling and reconfiguring a lot of the same things over and over while distro hopping, so I came up with a bash script with some of the most common configuration changes and such. As an example, here is my Fedora post=install script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash  

# remove all permission restrictions from current directory  
#sudo chmod -R a+rwX .  

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname [redacted]  

# prompt for ssh password to use later  
if [[ $1 == "" ]]; then  
    read -p "Enter ssh password: " ssh_pass  
else  
    ssh_pass=$1  
fi  

# default dnf prompts to 'y'  
sudo sh -c "echo 'defaultyes=True' >> /etc/dnf/dnf.conf"  

# install packages that are needed to add repos and other packages  
sudo dnf up -y && sudo dnf in curl flatpak wget -y  

#add repos  
sudo dnf copr enable lilay/topgrade -y  
sudo dnf copr enable aflyhorse/libjpeg -y  
sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://repository.mullvad.net/rpm/stable/mullvad.repo  
sudo dnf in https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm -y  
sudo dnf in https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm -y  
sudo sh -c 'curl -fsSL https://repo.librewolf.net/librewolf.repo | pkexec tee /etc/yum.repos.d/librewolf.repo'  
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo  
echo -e "[gitlab.com_paulcarroty_vscodium_repo]\nname=gitlab.com_paulcarroty_vscodium_repo\nbaseurl=https://paulcarroty.gitlab.io/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/rpms//nenabled=1/ngpgcheck=1/nrepo_gpgcheck=1/ngpgkey=https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg/nmetadata_expire=1h" | sudo tee -a /etc/yum.repos.d/vscodium.repo  

#install packages  
sudo dnf in augeas-devel btop cairo-devel cairo-gobject-devel cargo cmake codium dbus-devel expat-devel gifsicle gimp git kde-connect kdenlive libavcodec-freeworld librewolf libxkbcommon-devel lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings mpv mullvad-vpn ninja-build openssh-server openssl openssl-devel pipx python3-dbus python3-devel python3-pip rpmbuild syncthing thunderbird topgrade vlc sshpass -y  
sudo dnf in $(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/teervo/bitwig-fedora/refs/heads/main/bitwig-rpm.sh | bash -s 4.4.10) -y  
sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing -y  
export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH" && echo $'export PATH= \"$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH \"' >> ~/.bashrc  
cargo install gifski cargo-updateflatpak install com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player -y  
#pipx install numlockw  
pip install pandas odfpy  

#create ssh key, copy to servers  
ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -N '' <<< $'\ny' >/dev/null 2>&1  
hosts=("10.0.0.10" "10.0.0.11")  
for host in "${hosts[@]}"; do  
    ssh-keyscan -H $host >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts && sshpass -p "$ssh_pass" ssh-copy-id -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no [redacted]@$host && ssh -q [redacted]@$host exit  
done  

#enable/start ssh server  
sudo systemctl enable sshd  
sudo systemctl start sshd  

#add external drive to fstab to automount  
directory_secondary_drive=$HOME/nvme  
uuid=[redacted]  
sudo blkid  
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak  
sudo sh -c "echo 'UUID=$uuid $directory_secondary_drive       btrfs    rw,auto,user,exec 0 0' >> /etc/fstab"  
sudo mount -a  

#copy over custom config files  
directory_software=$directory_secondary_drive/sync/software  
cp -r $directory_software/setup/configs/* $HOME/.local/share/  

#install fonts  
cp $directory_software/fonts/* $HOME/.fonts  
fc-cache -vf  

#set git credentials  
git config --global user.name "[redacted]" && git config --global user.email "[redacted]@yourdomain.com"  

#add aliases to bashrc  
echo $'alias pipup=\'pip list -o | cut -f1 -d\'\\\'\' \'\\\'\' | tr " " " " | awk \'\\\'\'{if(NR>=3)print}\'\\\'\' | cut -d\'\\\'\' \'\\\'\' -f1 | xargs -n1 pip install -U\'' >> ~/.bashrc  
echo $'alias up=\"topgrade -y && echo \'\\nChecking pip\\n\' && pipup\"' >> ~/.bashrc  
echo $'alias e=\"exit\"' >> ~/.bashrc  

#https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox  

#print ssh key  
echo $'\nPublic SSH key:'  
cat $HOME/.ssh/*.pub  

Note that I used [redacted] here in places for anonymity reasons. This could give you a decent starting point to do something similar.

I’ve started creating an ansible playbook. I’ve added flatpaks, os specific packages, Firefox extensions, samba Mount point services in there. As of now I use it for PC (Ubuntu) and laptop (Fedora) only 3 is packages needed separate names. I’ll have a look at tuxmate as suggested in other post but just running playbook once every week also does update.

I have tuxmate selfhosted

There is a lot but I think you will find a lot of them more enterprise focused rather than consumer. For apps installed to home, why aren’t you preserving your /home partition? For system apps, could you create an image? (Although it should be basically a one liner?) There is a lot of missing detail, why are you reinstalling, what distribution(s)?

It’s probably better to write a script in a repo that downloads and installs everything…

Then for configuration files create a dotfiles repo. I use chezmoi but there are a bunch of solutions for this.

I use two tools for this:

1. https://www.chezmoi.io/ for all my various dotfiles
2. A bash script I’ve put together over the years that has a list of all the basics that I want and calls whatever the right installer is for them: apt, cargo, brew, or whatever. It has targets for a local workstation, a remote headless server, and MacOS. Then at then the end it runs chezmoi.

Now, my use case is less “constant fresh install” and more “keep my environment the same across various devices”, as I mostly run Debian Stable and don’t feel the need to constantly tweak things.