aconfmgr

https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr Aconfmgr is a good solution (practical trade-off for me). When it feel like "my OS must be dirty at this point", then I spend a couple minutes with this and I'm back to the clean state. I don't do this more then twice a year, so if you insist on an always clean system, YMMV

aconfmgr[https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr] is a kinda similar project for pacman-based distributions. The difference is that it strives to track all non-user files, (not just packages, and especially /etc), but you can adopt it partially.

> First, you won't use arch on production servers. I don’t know, for a pet server this might not be as dumb an idea as it sounds (though without automatic updates, obviously). Perhaps with aconfmgr[1]? I haven’t done it in anger, but over seven years of running Arch on a personal server I’ve had a total of three instances of breakage: upstream strongSwan systemd integration change[2] (when using a config format they’ve considered deprecated for years), upstream nftables parsing bug[3] (I knew in advance that nftables is for adventurous people), and upstream Kea config format change[4] (and, well, Kea really bloody sucks—suggestions for anything else that can do DHCPv6 PD welcome). All of those resulted in the relevant service failing to work at all and would’ve been caught by a reasonable staging environment. My (Arch) GNOME desktop broke

> Previously I used Arch, which I loved, but it was all to easy to completely shaft my setup and not be able to roll back. Here is my attempt at solving this problem: https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

If you use Arch Linux, you can get some of the advantages of NixOS using aconfmgr. It maintains the property that if something is not in the configuration file, it's not on the system; but, it builds upon that in that it still allows you to mutate the system (using e.g. a package manager) and later transcribe those edits to the configuration (or revert them). https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

If you're using Arch Linux now, you may find this project useful: https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

I created something similar for Arch Linux: https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr It has a few crucial differences from typical configuration managers, though, as it allows transcribing the system state back into your configuration.

Not sure if I'm reinventing the wheel, but incidentally I've been working on this lately: https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr It's like basic traditional configuration management, but it's two-way: it takes the difference between the user-managed configuration and the current system state, and rectifies this difference by either editing the configuration or the system. A second invocation is a no-op. If your configuration is in version control, this allows easily tracking any unaccounted changes to the system.