I’ve been reading up on the concept of dotfile management, and I’ve come across tools such as GNU Stow, chezmoi, and yadm, but before I select a tool, I’d like to understand the workflow a little better.
I understand if the dotfiles are in some cloud provider such as GitHub, then after a fresh install one can do git clone etc, but let’s say one’s dotfiles are not stored in the cloud, then what’s the workflow for getting those dotfiles onto the freshly installed OS? Do people do git clone from another machine on their local network, manually copy the dotfiles folder from the source, use an app like LocalSend, or something else?
EDIT: Clarifying that this is for a home environment, where I have two or three different laptops in service at any given time. One is my main daily driver and doesn’t change much. The other two are kinda my sandboxes and I’m often distro hopping on them. This question is mostly for distro hopping on my sandboxes, which is like once or twice a month. Thanks!
So, I have been wondering how distro hoppers handle setting up the system after an install… Going by this thread, it sounds like it is just a matter of stashing the config files somewhere else and then restoring them afterwards?
What about applications? I assume those need to be reinstalled and configs restored as well, or is it all manual after getting the OS set up?
One last question, does anyone have a link to an article explaining the process?
As a former distro hopper: i just partitioned my drives with /, /home and /opt and only replaced the root partition - yes I had a lot of config files that weren’t needed, but one could use scripts to help with that.
Then some scripts to reinstall the programs need and resetup /opt and i was ready to go. For my pis am doing it with ansible.
you can go crazier and use ansible or even just switch to NixOS if you want to have your entire system defined in configuration files. I use NixOS.
NixOS is great. I love just how extensively you can configure a system by simply dropping in a config file. If I have to set up a new system, I usually work it out in a VM, then just copy the config files onto the system’s fresh NixOS install and have it almost entirely set up in minutes.