Conversion from DEB based system to Arch

[onyxnz]

My wife has an old laptop running Mint 18.3. I want to standardise on EOS for our machines. I wondered if there was anything that can convert the packagelist of DEB based systems to Arch?

I have the DEB list like this:

dpkg --get-selections > ~/InstalledPackages.list

Which will give me results like (truncated):

xserver-xorg-video-intel                        install
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau                      install
xserver-xorg-video-qxl                          install
xserver-xorg-video-radeon                       install
xserver-xorg-video-vesa                         install
xserver-xorg-video-vmware                       install
xsltproc                                        install
xul-ext-lightning                               install
xviewer                                         install
xviewer-plugins                                 install
xz-utils                                        install
yelp                                            install
yelp-xsl                                        install
youtube-dl                                      install
zenity                                          install
zenity-common                                   install
zip                                             install
zlib1g:amd64                                    install
zlib1g:i386                                     install

But of course the packages are named differently for the two different *nixes. So is there any way to match the installs and save a life ?

[SimonJ]

The simplest way would be to install the same DE and then add the main applications. I would also suggest not using the same home directories, rename them (after backup) and then it makes it easy to copy non config files.

[jonathon]

@onyxnz

the packages are named differently

This. There are many packages that have no equivalent in Arch (e.g. any -dev package), so there’s no easy way of doing this. Make a note of the software you have installed, then reinstall it.