After some manual reinstalls and much repetition, I’ve been using a custom script for the past year or so, which I’m slowly open sourcing through a rewrite.

I haven’t. But having my home dir be a git repo helps a great deal. The rest I install when I need it

I wrote my own program, filetailor. It’s similar to Chezmoi but uses inline comments instead of templates for machine-specific lines. This allows me to make edits directly to my local files and then sync those changes to other machines.

I also use Ansible.

My dotfiles aren’t distro-specific because they’re symlinks into a git repo (or tarball) + a homegrown shell script to make them, and that’s about the end of it.

My NixOS configuration is split between must-have CLI tools/nice-to-have CLI tools/hardware-related CLI tools/GUI tools and functions as a suitable reference for non-Nix distros, even having a few comments on what the package names are elsewhere, but installation is ultimately still manual.

One thing I like to have with me is the AppImage version of programs when possible, since they usually work out of the box. Also helps ensuring I don’t depend on the availability of whatever package manager the system uses.

i’ve used Chezmoi for years now pretty successfully. works on my Mac and Linux machines. it probably could be made to work on Windows. i am transitioning to NixOS, but i’ll probably keep using it anyway, since i still have Macs for work (and because they’re great laptops don’t @ me). the only real downside is that it only works for the home folder, so i have to manually control stuff for /etc, but i generally prefer user configuration for most tools anyway.

i had messed around with Ansible for this in the past, but i didn’t really like it for this use case. it’s been a while tho so it’s hard to say why.

not to pile on, but you might also look at GNU Stow. i decided against it, but it’s there.

obligatory i s’pose: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles

Most of my files are different across machines because of different themes etc. The only dotfiles I have synced across machines are my .zshrc, .gitconfig, .ideavimrc (not my actual vimrc because it has some machine-specific theming), and .p10k.zsh. I have them all in a folder synced with syncthing and then I symlink ~/.zshrc to e.g. ~/dotfiles/.zshrc.

I’ve tried to move as much as I can into Flatpak. That way I can just copy my .var folder, and all my apps are migrated.

For other things like my configs, I use a git repo.

Nix, the package manager, is distro-agnostic. Add Home Manager on top of it and you’re good to go; both packages and dotfiles are dealt with.

I’ll be frank - I never have, though I probably should. For me, if an application’s configuration ever annoys me enough, I just manually copy the config from a machine that I already did the config.

One day, I may set up a shell script based on Debian’s Debootstrap that feeds it a list of packages (I think you can provide it a text file with a list of packages) to get everything set up, but that day is not today.

@Psyhackological I’ve cut the Gordian knot by running one distro everywhere

You can make a custom distro based on one of the Universal Blue or Fedora Atomic images.

https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template

You could also go to the bleeding edge, make a Containerfile, and use bootc and podman to build a bootable container.

I use vcsh and myrepos.

vcsh allows you to run multiple git repos that share ~ as their root, and mr simplifies/automates the management of those multiple repos. You can check out my setup here.

flakes and lock files are next level.

Chezmoi looks interesting. I’ve just been using xstow.