
That’s pretty much it. I personally would run conduits too while the walls are open, they’re pretty cheap and once you have them in place you can just run whatever you want and easily replace cables if needed. Maybe even add an extra conduit to expand wiring later on, but that depends on quite a few things.
I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.
It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.
But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.