Instead of nuking a partition and starting from scratch, is there a saner way to clean the system and slim it down?
Im resorting to listing explicitly installed packages and trying to write down what catches my eye that i dont use, or i wanted to try then forgot.
you could theoretically use something like ansible and manage your stuff there. i dont know if it is really practical on arch and for your use case. theoretically you’d write how your system should be into a playbook and on a fresh install you theoretically just had to run your playbook to get all the Packages and settings you need
I would go with the Arch specific https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aconfmgr-git instead of ansible, since it can save current system state as well. I use it and love it. See another reply on this post for a slightly deeper discussion on it.