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[N.B. My first post - guidance welcomed]
We have a small local network of users (5) on deb-based systems and would like to maintain an index of apps installed.
How can we, programmatically, inventory a given Linux desktop installation for all applications added by the user
Optimally, this would include distro repos but, also; appimage, snap & flatpak. It would exclude more container-ish elements such as docker & lxc/lxd.
I recommend you to use Ansible. Here's the tutorial to setup it on debian https://tecadmin.net/install-ansible-on-debian-9-stretch/. and you can follow this one to manage software package of other hosts.
etc-keeperit does more, but dose not easily answer what is installed. If you care about recovering an OS, then you needetc-keeper. Or configuration management (such as ansible). – ctrl-alt-delor Jun 16 at 9:12