This is how I do it. I’ll see something and think ‘hmm, interesting’ and completely forget any of the details but I’ll remember vaguely that something exists then I can search for it.
Language models are pretty good at solving the ‘I think I remember something that does this specific thing but don’t know where to look’ kinds of problems (don’t just blindly run LLM generated commands, kids). Then once you have a lead, traditional searching is much easier.
If you use -Qeq, you should be able to skip the awk part of the command.
TIL
Looks like I gave up on RTFM and turned to awk too early.
inxi -Fazy
That’s a pretty neat tool. I’ll definitely be using that for future troubleshooting.
My only, minor, gripe is that it shows kernel parameters which can contain the UUID of the LUKS partition containing your sysroot. This isn’t a factor in most people’s threat model, but it’s worth pointing out.
Just to add a bit more to this for the newbies who are using Arch (god help you).
pacman -Qe | awk '{print $1}' > packages.txt
Will write this list to a file, run without the ‘> packages.txt’ if you just want to see the output and;
sudo pacman -S --needed - < packages.txt
Will install all of the needed (i.e. not installed) packages from that list.
apt-mark showmanual
Should only show you the packages that you’ve explicitly installed (i.e. were not installed as dependencies).
If you installed meta packages (say, KDE Plasma) then it’ll mark each component of that install as manually installed.
apt-mark minimize-manual
Will mark the meta packages as auto instead of manual.
I did a system update today and it deleted my entry in the UEFI Boot Manager so I had to manually re-add it.
I wonder if these are related. e: I also use Arch
Yeah, it sounds like something you could do with SE linux and some scripting to handle mounting the user’s filesystem as needed.
It’s okay for asking some kinds of questions. But when you get down to specific packages you’re better off just reading the README.
You can always just ask here if you can’t figure something out