Setting your applications may get really messy - especially on Linux: different applications have different configuration approaches, they keep their binaries & data in different file-system locations (these differ because apps may have origins within varying Linux distributions). Once you set things up once, it's pretty hard to restore the previous state, especially if you've made some other changes in the meantime (for instance - installed something else). That's why provisioning tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Salt got that much popularity recently - but even with them, creating the cookbooks / recipes may still be very challenging: Linux is famous…