Mixed with syncthing to sync your database file across your devices and its chef’s kiss

I’m not sure I would agree for arch if the OP wants low maintenance. I’ve never run it myself, but the way I’ve heard arch described is the further you go without regular updates the more likely you are to have a problem when you do update.

Aren’t most app configurations and settings saved in the user’s .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?

/home/[username]/.config/

I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we’re just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script

sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc…

if we’re talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used, like home-manager