I use Nix, so I’ll just reinstall my system if anything really bad ever happens. Sometimes I reinstall just because. My important files are on a delegate drive I have to manually mount, so I’m not too worried.

Take the next step, and write a simple ansible playbook to configure your installed applications and services. It looks a little complicated at first but it’s pretty easy.

Then you just keep your playbook with your other files. When you decide to reinstall, you just install ansible then run it on your playbook. It’ll install and set up everything you add to your OS.

I only know the Ansible as the intergalactic communication system from Ursula K Le Guins novels, so this comment is too cool to me.

That’s almost certainly where it came from. This might be hard to believe, but Linux devs are often huge nerds.