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?

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    46·
    3 days ago

    instead of searching and installing all your apps one-by-one

    And… that takes what, a good all 5 minutes?

    Honestly unless you either re-install an OS frequently (which is a weird thing to do on a day-to-day system) or plan to go offline for a long period of time I bet you’d spend more time finding a “solution” then not doing so manually.

    I’m not you but when I install a fresh OS (maybe once every couple of years, at most!) on my desktop (not counting other devices, handheld, servers, etc) I install

    • Firefox (if it’s not already by default, if it’s ESR then I might get a different update mechanism)

    …well honestly that’s it!

    Then yes as I start to work I add KDEnlive, OBS, Blender, Cura, OpenSCAD, etc.

    My point being that I can’t imagine a moment when, as you start the OS you actually need all the other software at the same time. You usually need one, then another, e.g. Inkscape to edit a PDF document you just received, then you pass the extract image to e.g. LibreOffice Writer.

    So… not having everything from the start is IMHO a good moment to consider what you actually need, keep things lean.

    TL;DR: there are technical solutions but on a desktop connected to the Internet it’s not worth it.

    PS: I do personally keep my bash history or my ~/bin/ and ~/Apps/~ directories across installations (because I do keep ~` on a dedicated partition) with some AppImages in but honestly I don’t rely on these.