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- Hacker News
- It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.
Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.
by spudlyo - I've been using [yadm](https://yadm.io/) instead which works really well!by rochak
- I evaluated most of the popular dotfile management tools and found them far too complex for the problems they try to solve. I then used stow for about a year just to see whether symlinks would cause any issues. They did.
Eventually, I wrote my own bidirectional sync tool that synchronizes a git checkout (for example, ~/.dotfiles) with the actual home directory. I run it as a systemd service, so I can simply edit or delete files in ~/.dotfiles, and everything else happens automatically.
I can add or remove files in the repository, and they will automatically be created or removed in their synchronized locations. At the same time, the target directories can contain other unrelated files, including an entire $HOME, and this does not interfere with synchronization in any way.
The bidirectional sync is particularly useful when a program, such as vs code, decides to modify its own configuration files, or when I'm feeling lazy and just want to edit ~/.bashrc directly and commit the changes later.
Achieving this requires some careful logic that, hopefully, I've managed to get right. At least at the time I wrote it, I hadn't seen these implemented in other systems.
Oh, and I use the same sync for some files I need to /etc, only for that I run sudo scripts and dont' have a always-on service for obvious reasons.
I'd be happy if someone else found it useful too: https://github.com/senotrusov/etcdotica
by senotrusov - Switched to Chezmoi from random assortment of manually authored scripts. The workflow takes some getting used to, because I constantly edit the actual files without calling `chezmoi edit` first, and have to merge.
I like that when combined with `mise` (https://mise.jdx.dev) I can roll out a new computer in 2-3 commands and have my entire environment configured the way I like, with neovim and all the plugins and language servers.
by vsviridov - Once you hit the Chezmoi stage, you're only about 6 months from Nix and Home Manager. I mean, why climb _almost_ to the top of a mountain and then just sit down?by pkulak
- I had similar problems with GNU Stow, but switched to Nix and Home Manager instead.
I think Chezmoi's templates and file naming conventions don't click for me, but it's nice to see a good variety in this problem space.
by drdexebtjl - It’s quite new but I’ve been cooking up some new bootstrapping features with mise which people may find relevant here: https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap.html
It’s for things like dotfiles, apt/brew packages, and LaunchAgents/systemd.
EDIT: I feel a little bad having hijacked this, as someone that hears a lot of opinions about devtools I can definitely say chezmoi is a darling of the community and I highly recommend checking it out.
by jdxcode - > The trouble is that symlinks cut both ways. Every edit on every machine writes straight through the link into that machine’s clone of the repo.
I find this is a key feature. If a file is edited, git shows it as dirty, and I get to decide if I discard of commit the change. No extra steps required.
> By the time Homebrew and a couple of tools have run on a new Mac, files like ~/.zprofile and ~/.gitconfig already exist.
I don't get why you'd manually provision those files instead of just putting them in dotfiles.
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Personally, I found that most tools in this space tried to do too much or were too complex. I previously wrote a minimal one in Rust, but eventually re-wrote it into less than 200 lines of shell, which works pretty much anywhere, without having to install anything at all, and is part of the dotfiles repository itself:
https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/dotfiles/tree/ac97cb196f02cafa...
by WhyNotHugo