Ralph suggested:
I record all the installed packages and their versions in a file just
before every backup. The idea being with a comm(1) or diff(1) after
recovery I can re-install missing packages en masse instead of figuring
out what's missing piecemeal.
dpkg-query -W --showformat '${package} ${version} ${status}\n'
I ran this and it gave me a list of hundreds of 'packages' and for one
who doesn't understand linux as well as Ralph, it is daunting. I thought
that it would be useful as I have ordered a new spinning rust thing for
this computer and was going to rebuild the system, so it would be good
to know what I had.
I notice that I have about 40 files called linux-signed-image-*.*.* and
linux-system-extra-*.*.* of different versions. Do I need to get rid of
most of these, and how do I do it?
How do I know which are OS applications and which are user applications?
Cheers,
Peter
PS, I just upgraded a week or so ago from Kubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 and
forgot to do a backup first, but luckily it went OK, with just a couple
of twiggles to sort out.
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