but also now i’m thinking in my head if there were something that could package everything down to the OS so i only have to install ONE thing to have a ready to go machine for my exact purposes. Which probably exists, and has a name, but fuck if i know what they’re called.
This would be a golden image/master image/clone image. You install from the golden image that you’ve created and you get a machine configured exactly how you want it.
There’s also NixOS, which is a linux distribution that builds an entire operating system from a single text file. When the hard drive my operating system was on was failing I replaced the drive, installed NixOS, and then just pulled down my config and built from it and had everything exactly how I wanted it again. The longest part was actually installing the new drive.
In the early days of federation the posting numbers were used as “evidence” of hexbear being a Russian bot farm.