I have a simple wish, with a probably not so simple solution.
I recently started with linux (Arch kde), I’m loving it, I quickly realized that this OS and almost all apps, are highly customizable, I’m laving that as well. My problem is the unavoidable reinstalls and that I have a laptop.
Is there any way that I can save all my configs, apps and my apps’ configs, and transfer them over to my laptop, while almost having a very quick back-up. I realize that I could turn it into an ISO somehow, but that wouldn’t work (I think) because my laptop has vastly different hardware. I also realize the partitioning problem. So in my idealistic world, there should be a solution that requires a clean install (from scripts or manual) and some .sh file, that installs all my apps, pastes all my configs and reboots.
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?
For final words I’d like to say that I’m far from finished configurating, but I’d like to know the proccess, to not shoot myself in the foot somewhere along the way of configing, thanks!
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 themingcurrently, 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
You’re not the only one who mentioned NixOS. But you warned me about the quality. Thank you.
Also, I’d really not want to switch of my current system. I already have data, configs and everything. I probably could re-do it in days, but seems like a lot of struggle to use a worse distro in the other 99% of the time when I’m not thinking about moving configs to my laptop.