Yes, a playbook would run post-OS install. It's either executed locally or anything you can SSH to. If being careful enough one can support multiple OS-s with t

Yes, a playbook would run post-OS install. It's either executed locally or anything you can SSH to. If being careful enough one can support multiple OS-s with the same playbook (at least different Linux flavors) but it's definitely quite some maintenance like different package names and conf file locations etc. A playbook contains tasks like installing, removing packages, editing config files etc. The beauty of it is that if done correctly you can run the same playbook over and over again against the same computer and each task can be smart enough to know if it needs to be run or not. This makes updating your computer with the same or updated playbook very fast. With Ubuntu it's easy to get to the post-OS install, it's more involved with Arch Linux. I would first create an Arch box with Vagrant using Virtualbox. And then create a playbook that works with that virtual Arch box. If the box and ansible playbook is good enough then https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Moving_an_existing_install_into_(or_out_of)_a_virtual_machine https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Moving_an_existing_inst... At least in theory, I haven't moved Arch between VM and a real host myself... Of course you can also just do a manual Arch install and then run the playbook but that would miss half the fun of doing less by doing more.