this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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Linux

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Tool to automate Linux reinstall? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by staircase@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I frequently reinstall Linux. Is there a tool to say what to install and configure that I can just run once after OS install? Things like

  • Install neovim, signal, steam
  • Configure firefox, desktop environment

I'm using this for just me, on my personal machine.

I don't anticipate it's possible between different distros, so assume I'm reinstalling the same distro.

EDIT: thanks for replies. I'm mostly seeing Ansible and NixOS. I'll start looking at those.

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[–] ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is why we put /home on a separate partition for reuse on new installs. It saves your users' files. Your steam, WM, Firefox config, even document files are already basically portable between installs.

And in those files, we may as well put a bash script that does your pacman/apt/dnf/emerge/yay for the everything. This could be easy like with Gentoo or a PITA like with Debian to just scrape from the system right before migration.

Firefox is weird when you hop between distros. Some distros use the LTS (long term stable) version, others use the normal Stable branch... Does Debian still maintain an IceWeasel fork of Firefox? This means you may want to manually copy a folder to a backup location to manually slot it in after the distro-hop. Either way, you want to download a popular privacy-focused user.js file from Github ;)