You can copy your home directory on macOS, too, I do it every time I get a new machine and it works fine. I just `cp -a` my home directory onto the external drive and do the same back off. I do have to chown -R the directory sometimes, if the UID is different for some reason. Obviously you need to reinstall the applications, but that is mostly just dragging them into /Applications. Not too much different from `apt-get install`ing them, really.