Can you just make a base image and then clone the image across. You would need to change the machine ID but that's pretty easy to do.

Alternatively you could use Ansible pull on a fresh install to set everything up

I don't know how clonezilla works, but one thing I've discovered that causes issues when you copy a Linux distro from one machine to another, assuming you do a file system copy and not a raw partition copy so the new file system partition has a different UUID than the old, you need to fix the UUID in both /etc/fstab and /etc/initramfs-tools/resume before it will work properly.

I'd happily give technical advice but first I need to understand the actual need.

I don't mean "what would be cool" but rather what's the absolute minimum basic that would make a solution acceptable.

Why do I insist so much? Well because installing a distribution, e.g. Debian, takes less than 1h. Assuming you have a separate /home directory, there is no need to "copy" anything, only mounting correctly. If it is on another physical computer then the speed will depend on the your storage capacity and hardware (e.g. SSD vs HDD). Finally "configuring" each piece of software will take a certain amount of time, especially if you didn't save the configuration (which should be the case).

Anyway, my point being that :

• installing the OS takes little time
• copying data across physical devices take a lot more time
• configuring manually specific software takes a bit of time

So, if you repeat the operation several times a week, investing time to find a solution can be useful. If you do this few times a year or less, it's probably NOT actually efficient.

So, again, is this an intellectual endeavor, for the purpose of knowing what an "ideal' scenario would be or is it a genuine need?