I use Nix, so I’ll just reinstall my system if anything really bad ever happens. Sometimes I reinstall just because. My important files are on a delegate drive I have to manually mount, so I’m not too worried.
Take the next step, and write a simple ansible playbook to configure your installed applications and services. It looks a little complicated at first but it's pretty easy.
Then you just keep your playbook with your other files. When you decide to reinstall, you just install ansible then run it on your playbook. It'll install and set up everything you add to your OS.
NixOS really is the next step from an ansible setup like yours imo. It can and usually is a fully declarative and immutable system outside of your nix config and whatever personal files you have.
Yeah, I get that. I'm not about to trust NixOS for my production machines at work and since I already know Ansible it's just as easy for me to manage my home machines the same way.
Of course it’s all personal preference, but I’ve been managing my dot files from the very beginning with nix(home manager). Never tried ansible, but, just like you, don’t really need to, as everything is already set up well in Nix(including all my configs for all my programs).
Oh I’m sure, that word isn’t used for a lot of other things. It’s neat how much anarchist and socialist lore is hidden inside of FOOS and Linux tech terminology, including the word Ansible. So refreshing compared to closed source devs unironically naming their products after murderous AI or what have you.
Ansible was indeed used by Orson Scott Card in his Ender’s series, about 20 or so years after it was first coined by Le Guin. Funny to think of someone reading such good novels as Ursula’s and still coming out of it a bigoted asshole.
One of the things I learned several years ago was how to set up my HD so that the system and home folder are on different partitions. It isn't terribly hard to do, and every OS installer I've used gives you the option. It's served me very well.
I don’t have a need for that atm(like I said, my laptop has a separate drive), but will look into that in case I ever need it in the future. My problem with this personally tho is that I share my drive between Windows and Linux, and Linux doesn’t exactly play well with NTFS. Sounds really cool however for having a multi boot Linux system, with all your files shared between distros.