The question is why are you rebuilding your local machine OS to begin with. If your machine failed, you restore from backup, you don’t rebuild. If you are upg

The question is why are you rebuilding your local machine OS to begin with. If your machine failed, you restore from backup, you don’t rebuild. If you are upgrading OS, you’ll want to carefully review all the changes you do. There is a lot of churn in desktop linuxes, and that hack you did five years ago to get your mouse to work is likely no longer necessary. You may want to keep notes in text format about what you did, but each step is still manual. If you need to install suspicious software which bypasses your package manager and cannot be uninstalled easily, you don’t risk your primary machine, you do it in VM to begin with. Your selected config files that you have carried with you over the years, like .bashrc and .emacs, should be in some sort of source control anyway. The projects you are working on should have dependency install instructions - config for your package manager, and install_deps.sh script for your C/C++ stuff. With all this, I do not see much point for Ansible playbooks.