Is it advisable to sync Applications and User prefs between two Macs?
There are a number of ways to achieve this and probably twice as many traps. That said, I've had a lot of success using Mackup. It can backup your dot files, plist files, is customizable and can integrate with several cloud storage services or a local file server. I run this hourly as a cron job to make sure I'm always backing up. This works well on settings but not apps. You can find this at https://github.com/lra/mackup

You could also use Homebrew as a way of "synching" your applications. brew list &gt; souceAppList on your iMac will list the applications installedthere. You could do the same on your MacBook and grep the difference to see what is missing. Something like:

targetApps="$(brew list)" 
for checkThisApp in $(cat /some/path/to/sourceAppList); do
  if [[ "$checkThisApp" != "$(echo "$targetApps"|grep -o $checkThisApp)" ]]; then
    echo "$appCheck is not installed on this computer"  # to notify an app is missing
    brew install "$appCheck"                            # to force the app install
  fi
done