question regarding post-installed packages

[Christian <abelschreck3@freenet.de>]

    Hi altogether,
    
    I'm new to Debian and so far I like it very much.
    
    I´ve some (basic) knowledge regarding Linux-distros but this
    knowledge is based on the fact that I´ve been using Lubuntu (ubuntu
    derivative) for some time now.
    
    I appreciate there are some differences between Ubuntu and Debian so
    I installed Debian10 buster as a VM - in order to gather
    some experience with it.
    
    Up and until now I seem to be getting along with it just fine and I
    like the fact that it´s really lightweight.
    
    I´ve got one question though:
    
    Using (L)Ubuntu I had a certain command at hand which helped
    me with fresh/clean installs.
    
    Before converting to a new version I entered the following command
    (on the old OS) in the terminal:
    
    comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(gzip -dc
      /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' |
      sort -u)
    
    This gave me list of all packages which were post-installed after
    the initial setup.
    All I had to do was putting the results of the command in a text
    file, say "result.txt".
    
    The beauty of this command is that it produces the packages
    (programmes that I installed with apt)  without any
    dependencies.
    
    After installing the new system I used the command
    
    xargs -a /path-to-result.txt sudo apt-get install
    
    and my new system was on the same level as my old one before.
    
    Trying out that very command in Debian however didn´t work as
    desired:
    
    comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(gzip -dc
      /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' |
      sort -u)
    gzip: /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz: No such file or
      directory
    adduser
    anydesk
    apt
    ...
    zlib1g
    
    So there was some output but not the one I was looking for.
    
    The file "initial-status.gz" indeed doesn´t exist in
    /var/log/installer. 
    
    Here are the contents of /var/log/installer in Debian:
    
    rosika2@debian ~> ll /var/log/installer/
    insgesamt 1,4M
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K Jun 16 16:59 cdebconf/
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  20K Jun 16 16:59 hardware-summary
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  160 Jun 16 16:59 lsb-release
    -rw------- 1 root root 107K Jun 16 16:59 partman
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  72K Jun 16 16:59 status
    -rw------- 1 root root 1,2M Jun 16 16:59 syslog
    -rw------- 1 root root  41K Jun 16 16:59 Xorg.0.log
    
    So my question is: Does this file exist at all (possibly using
    another path)?
    Or is there another preferred way of getting info concerning all
    post-installed packages (without their dependencies)?
    
    Thanks a lot for your help in advance.
    
    Many greetings.
    Rosika