this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
36 points (97.4% liked)
Linux
56926 readers
1150 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For me that's the main benefit of using home-manager on nixos and other distros. You basically just make a list of packages, and install/update them through home-manager.
I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we're just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script
sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc...
if we're talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used
I guess most people would not only want to easily reinstall all their apps, but also the settings related to them.
Sadly that’s the difficult part.
When I see how much time it takes me to have all my calendar and settings in Thunderbird.
Luckily for Thunderbird you can save your profile if everything takes less than 2gb, but it’s still a hassle to find a way to backup every program.
Aren't most app configurations and settings saved in the user's .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?
/home/[username]/.config/