Consider your perfect settings as the part you want to keep (as well as all your documents etc, of course), but the OS will change. Tomorrow you’ll do an update and 2 applications and 10 libraries are now newer… so you probably don’t want to store a “golden image” for too long without redoing it to consider all the updates. Now… with that situation in mind, it’s generally easier to just do a clean install of the distro and reapply your settings. So, depending on what you’ve setup, installed, tweaked & configured, saving that can be done with config files in /etc and /home and maybe a 1-liner for applications to install. That will be smaller and more easily reproducable on all your hardware (and maybe some VMs) How you do that depends on what you’ve changed and your skills… maybe bash, maybe ansible, maybe just copying files - whatever makes sense to you.