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.
aconfmgr may meet your needs. It is billed as a configuration manager for Arch and will track installed packages and changed package files.
I can second this, I use aconfmgr and love it. Especially useful to manage multiple computers (desktop, laptop, old computer doing other things etc).
Though I’m currently planning to rewrite it since it doesn’t seem maintained any more, and I want a multi-distro solution (because I also want to use it on my Pis where I run Raspbians). The rewrite will be in Rust, and I’m currently deciding on what configuration language to use. I’m leaning towards rhai (because it seems easy to integrate from the rust side, and I’m not getting too angry at the language when reading the docs for it). Oh and one component for it is already written and published: https://github.com/VorpalBlade/paketkoll is a fast rust replacement for paccheck (that is used internally by aconfmgr to find files that differ).
Guess that will do! Something to log what was installed so i could backtrack instead of formatting ( since i wanted to see what wayland is like, then lets try sway! then some other versioins of wine and so on, i cannot remember what the hell i installed haha )