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?
Sure, but then you need to maintain it. I don’t know about you, but I never had the discipline to update it with every package install and uninstall. It’s especially annoying when you have multiple devices.
Declarative package management doesn’t have that issue since you’re managing the packages by editing the list.
Besides that, the home-manager approach works on any distro (and os?), you get bleeding edge packages, you get a built in rollback system, and you can handle configs as well (but I mainly just symlink them anyways).
You can write a script to periodically check the installed packages and update the 1st script. Its basically the output of “dnf list installed”
/facepalm moment for not thinking of that at the time
But it’s lacking organisation and modularity. For example let’s say you need programming packages on one device, gaming ones on another, and general ones on both. It’s pretty easy to set it up with hm, and you can disable specific modules when you don’t need them (for example you rarely need to use a certain language and supporting packages).