I'd love having a file that lists all software like in nix. It has always been a miracle to me why I don't have a history of installed packages. Before I moved to atomic fedora, I created a shell script that was like "sudo apt install openssh \ yt-dlp \ firefox". With this I would've known what I had installed previously. Since packages are built on top of the system image on atomic distros, they have to keep track now and I don't have to do it anymore.

To me, nix is still young in the sense that it is not as mature and user friendly as other distros. There are still "3 major different" ways to use nix. (I actually have no idea how many ways but it seems like you can do everything). It needs to be very simple.

I actually use home manager on my device and the package landscape is still not as reliable as on fedora, in my experience.

You want ansible

For what its worth, many package managers support some method of exporting a list of installed packages to a file (or in a way that can be easily piped to a file), and its not difficult to pipe a file of packages into a shell loop to get the behavior as described.

Native support in the package manager would be nice, sure, but the Unix philosophy of providing tools that can easily augment each other to solve problems means this is generally a trivial thing to implement by anyone in a way that works best for their use case.

You could build a Debian installation with user-defined list of packages since way back in 2010. It's just a bit too technical for an average spreadsheet cowboy who decided to ditch M$ Losedows.

Also, Docker does exactly what you describe, just inside the VM. There's a whole ass new position for Dockerscript coders, called devops or something. I think there should be an easy way to install Docker image onto the real hardware with no Docker inbetween too, this question deserves researching.

dpkg --get-selections

It has been part of my backup scripts since forever. And of course backing up /etc is possible on every distribution.