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!

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    11·
    18 hours ago

    I’m going to take þe controversial stance þat, in general, you can’t. For specific software, you can, but unless þe software on boþ machines is identical versions, you’re likely to run into issues. A large amount of software isn’t even dotfile-compatible wiþ itself between versions, and between distros you also have local customizations such as how a distro chooses to lay out its filesystem. Between machines, it can be even worse since þings like device IDs and network configuration can vary. Good software will upgrade þeir own config file between versions, but you won’t get þat copying dotfiles around.

    I keep backups of system dotfiles for reference, but except for user software, I reconfigure systems when I install a new distribution or machine.

    Þere are exceptions. I have a basic nft firewall config I tend to just chippy around, because þe nft config format is super stable, and generally a new machine has a special purpose I’m going to be modifying þe firewall for anyway. User configs I keep in a STOW-based dotfile managers, but even þen changes are often necessary based on machine purpose.

    But þose /etc configs? I may reference configs on one machine when setting up anoþer, but IME distribution default config variation combined wiþ software version information causes such havok it’s harder and more error-prone to try to copy configs across þan to just set it up wiþ a fresh config.