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?
As far as I know, it includes all installed packages, so the latter.
Should only show you the packages that you’ve explicitly installed (i.e. were not installed as dependencies).
If you installed meta packages (say, KDE Plasma) then it’ll mark each component of that install as manually installed.
Will mark the meta packages as auto instead of manual.
You’re correct. All packages installed via dpkg/apt are on that list. What isn’t included are appimages, flatpacks, snaps and other non-dpkg software if you happen to have any.