Consider your perfect settings as the part you want to keep (as well as all your documents etc, of course), but the OS will change.

Tomorrow you’ll do an update and 2 applications and 10 libraries are now newer… so you probably don’t want to store a “golden image” for too long without redoing it to consider all the updates.

Now… with that situation in mind, it’s generally easier to just do a clean install of the distro and reapply your settings.

So, depending on what you’ve setup, installed, tweaked & configured, saving that can be done with config files in /etc and /home and maybe a 1-liner for applications to install.

That will be smaller and more easily reproducable on all your hardware (and maybe some VMs)

How you do that depends on what you’ve changed and your skills… maybe bash, maybe ansible, maybe just copying files - whatever makes sense to you.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road.

But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. Although still much less time than setting up from scratch.

It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, and can’t propagate changes in the VM to my existing systems easily, so I’m interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).

I understand where you are coming from but I would take the opposite approach, namely not how quickly and conveniently you get back to exactly the same state (because that’s actually really hard) but rather how quickly and conveniently you can get to work, or play, or do whatever you do, from the most generic of hardware and software, including of course yours. What this perspective suggests though is NOT to consider your stuff precious but on the contrary, to assume it will inevitably disappear, due to any reason, from a freak event, e.g stolen to the mundane, e.g. hardware failure over time.

IMHO it’s much more relaxing to consider hardware disposable. My own heuristic for this is to understand what a distribution does, save only MY data (e.g. things that I produce, for example in a data it would be my saves but not the game itself) and buy only well supported hardware.

Anything that creates a reproducable build for you is fine; however, learning Ansible (or Puppet, etc.) puts you on the road to being able to do that sort of thing professionally.

I mostly backup /home and /etc on my home machines. Anything else I can recreate with configuration-as-code tools like Ansible.

Your best bet is to set up bash scripts instead that downloads packages and copies/compiles every single thing you need. Then send em to gitlab.

t. That is what I do.

For me that would be a waste of time. Just because my setup seems perfect today, tomorrow I might decide to make changes to accommodate a new task. My pc’s are living breathing machines that are always a day or 2 away from a slight tweak.

When I move to a new machine, I rarely want to replicate another machine I have as then I would have 2 machines setup for the same tasks. Each machine serves a different purpose so needs a different setup.

If I am replacing a machine, then I would transfer the physical disk itself. Only use clonezilla type tools for replacing a disk, as in replacing the sata SSD holding root with a new fast nvme.

It’s easy to transfer config files from one machine to another if you want to replicate some specific setups.

An alternative to complete cloning (which gets out of date fast) would be to manage systems with ansible.(or puppet, or chef).

You can script configurations, package installs, users, etc. And it also allows for hardware/architecture specifics when needed (e.g. drivers for the different platforms).

You would then just install a base os and run your playbook. No need to store gigs of data and easier to update the base os to newer versions. You could even mix

You can also push out changes without needing to snapshot a new image and re-install it everywhere.

They are all different hardware so you’ll run into issues where the system has drivers or settings for the original hardware that is different on the next hardware.

Lots of drivers are already in the kernel, but I think you’ll find your better off using NixOS or MicroOS and making a proper install recipe.

With standard PC hardware, that would work.

Some things like firmware or drivers can be auto-detected and installed on demand. Symptom would be that e.g. your WiFi or video card does not work.

The safe way is to back up user data (including config) and install newly. This will work almost always as the kernel provides hardware abstraction - that is its main purpose.

Installers like Debian are also quite quick… quicker than restoring a backup.