[xubuntu-users] Is there a way to get a list of added packages so they can be re-installed after a clean installation (as opposed to upgrade)?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 13:49 +0200, Ralf Mardorf used the wrong account
for this list and wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 12:41 +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > I'd really prefer to do a clean new installation occasionally rather
> > than doing a distribution upgrade.  On one system in particular I have
> > a number of issues which I think would probably be sorted out by doing
> > a clean installation.
> > 
> > It's easy enough to make a copy of (or use a different partition) for
> > /home so that that can be restored.
> > 
> > The difficult bit is to get back all the extra packages I have
> > installed in addition to the basic ones installed with Ubuntu/Xubuntu.  Is
> > there any reasonably clean and easy way to get a list of added
> > packages that one could feed into apt-get (or dpkg) to re-install all
> > the extras?
> 
> Synaptic provides such an option somewhere in the menus. I'm booted to
> Arch Linux now, so I can't take look at it. However, Synaptic is a
> backend for apt, apt provides this too.
> 
> Another way seems to be to use dpkg:
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/17823/how-to-list-all-installed-packages