Prep for wipe/reinstall. List current installed packages (pacman/yay)

TLDR: I’d like to get a list of installed native/AUR/Flatpak packages that aren’t native to the EnOS installer so I can speed-run my laptop reinstall.

So, I already know you can get a list of installed packages by typing pacman -Qe (or yay -Qe) in a terminal, but the resulting list (300+ items) includes many that are already installed by the EnOS Titan iso.

My laptop is currently dual-boot Win11/EnOS and it’s time to wipe Win11 and install EnOS clean with btrfs (for snapshots) instead of ext4. My ‘Home’ is on a separate partition, so should be safe. But in case I need to wipe all the partitions and start from scratch, I’d like a nice clean list of apps to install to mirror what I already have.

Suggestions?

Just make a list of your current packages (use yay -Qqs to get package names without versions), then make another one after your clean install. Any diff program should make short work of that.

For flatpaks, use flatpak list --all. EOS does not install any, so there’s nothing to compare to.

when reinstalling if you add the --needed flag to your pacman/yay command it will only download and install the packages that are not already in the system.