I’ve been dual-booting since the early-oughts, but I’m only just now preparing to delete my Windows partition for good.
What with all the repartitioning in my future, I figure it’s a good time to just make a clean start - reinstall from scratch. …but I have about a decade’s worth of tools and dotfile tweaks accumulated, including things like updates to xorg.conf to support my old (but awesome) mouse.
So… What’s your favored toolset to get your machine back to the way you like it?
I’ve done this all manually many a time, backing up my home dir, writing scripts to install software, copy important config files into place, etc.
How do you like to go about reinstalling your programs, restoring .dotfiles and config?
I just tar up /home and /etc, install the new system, untar my backup to a directory inside my home directory, and then copy only the stuff I wanted to keep.
I see a fresh install as an opportunity for a new start.