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!

  • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    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

    You’re just asking how to copy files from one computer to another. There is nothing specific to dotfiles here at all, right? So just do whatever you’d normally do for copying files?

    • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      True, although it’s not unusual for me to think I know all my options, and then discover new ideas by reading how other people do it. (I mean in general, not specific to copying files from one machine to another)