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    You might want to check etckeeper. I think the "original" version is still maintained by Joey Hess here, and there are some others on GitHub that may be OK also. Commented May 4, 2023 at 5:52
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    This line of reasoning led me down the path of Nix/guix. It imposes some constraints, but might be what you're looking for. Commented May 4, 2023 at 14:39
  • Some files in /etc are already symlinks. Commented May 5, 2023 at 8:39
  • “Often the reason I'm not upgrading my hardware is because I don't want to be setting up a new machine.” You can move the SSD or hard drive on the new machine and boot on it, it should work. And if you can't reuse the same storage (like going from SATA to NVMe), you can still "copy-paste" the filesystem from on machine to another. This way you don't have to start from scratch. Commented May 5, 2023 at 11:59
  • Very few if any of the files in /etc are hardware-specific these days (xorg.conf used to be the most prominent case 10+ years ago, it is not anymore). There's typically nothing stopping you from just copying/cloning everything to a new machine and running with that. My current home desktop was originally installed on a dual-socket Pentium III and has gone through several generations of underlying HW without a single OS reinstall. Similarly, switching work laptops always meant I just cloned the entire drive, no reinstallation or backup/restore needed. Commented May 5, 2023 at 19:32