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?
For me that’s the main benefit of using home-manager on nixos and other distros. You basically just make a list of packages, and install/update them through home-manager.
I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we’re just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script
sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc…
if we’re talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used