Bankenstein

Wezterm is my favourite because it’s really configurable and supports ligatures. Konsole is also quite nice. Generally I’m in favour of using whichever one comes with your DE, or Wezterm if you use a WM.

Kitty is probably the most popular one, but I don’t like it cause no ligature support no acceleration it claims it has good font management, but fonts never worked properly in my experience.

Alacritty and Foot are also popular for their performance. Alacritty does have some stability issues though.

What are the contents of /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts? Also don’t forget to reboot after changing the hostname!

Garuda is definitely the right choice for your use case.

Move all your heavily modified config files into a git repository and host it somewhere. Then symlink all your config files to where they should be with ln -s ~/.config/whatever ~/gitrepo/whatever. That’s how you preserve your important configs.

You can easily get a list of your installed packages (which you can keep in your repository) with apt list --installed > packages.txt. You can then format that list to one you can install from with sed -e "s-/.*$--" <packages.txt (or something, i don’t have apt, can’t test it fully).

In fact, if someone here is more familiar with apt, please find a way to filter out packages that were not explicitly installed and reply to this comment with your solution.