If you regularly pull up new systems (also VMs), it indeed becomes worth it to do some form of automation. For me, instead of having a whole orchestration setpu

If you regularly pull up new systems (also VMs), it indeed becomes worth it to do some form of automation. For me, instead of having a whole orchestration setpu, I just have a simple .bashrc that I copy everywhere and it has a few package lists in the form of functions: - Running `defaultinstall` will install vim, git, iotop, progress, curl, and other essentials, and it runs apt-file update. - Running `defaultinstalloptional` will pull more packages like sipcalc, cloc, woof, and other packages that I like but are not something I use on every system or do not use regularly. - Running `defaultinstallwifi` pulls wavemon, iw, and wireless-tools; `defaultinstallprogramming` gets me interpreters and compilers that I regularly use; `defaultinstallgui` gets me GUIs that I use (audacity, gimp, wireshark, xdotool, xclip, etc.); etc. On a new system I run whichever ones are applicable (e.g. a desktop may be GUI but not WiFi). Together with copying .bashrc, .vim/, and .vimrc, that's 90% of the setup I need for a non-GUI system. On a GUI system, I will want to set some task bar preferences. Only replacing my main system is an exception: I'll simply copy my filesystem from the old system (or, more often, physically move over the SSD), since I'll want to have the files, firefox profile, thunderbird config, etc. anyway. Takes nearly zero time to maintain and is not dependent on anything that I don't already consider essential (Debian won't ship without bash-compatible shell or a package manager for a long time) so there is only one manual pre-setup step: copying a text file.