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How have you automated configuring your machines in terms of packages and dotfiles so it works cross-distro?

I’m looking for interesting tools to automate managing packaging and configuring everything automated.

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment so I for now know these:

  • Ansible - automating many machines, using different package names as vars and package managers.
  • Bash - the most native and compatible scripting language that can be.
  • Chezmoi - for dotfiles.

For now that’s it. I’m looking forward for your suggestions!

Wooki ,

flakes and lock files are next level.

Takios ,
@Takios@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I use SaltStack to automate my servers. Just feels better than Ansible to me.
For my PC and laptop I don’t do anything, I haven’t hopped distribution since I started using Tumbleweed a few years ago.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

I heard about Salt being better alternative than Ansible. Why? I see.

Takios ,
@Takios@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

The clear cut of state data, pillar data and formulae feels more intuitive to me than Ansible’s playbook organization.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

For person using only Ansible I don’t know what are you talking about. 😆

MonkderVierte ,

I have a custom /etc/profile that loads /etc/session.d/$HOSTNAME-$USER scripts.

possiblylinux127 ,

Ansible is probably the most mature

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

And industry sstandard, yeah.

KindaABigDyl ,
@KindaABigDyl@programming.dev avatar

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment

If you know about NixOS, then you probably know this, but Nix, the package manager/the language behind NixOS, is cross-platform.

I daily drive NixOS, but I also use Nix (and home-manager) on my Fedora music laptop, my Ubuntu home file-server, and my work Windows machine (WSL) to install and configure neovim automatically instead of copying a config, installing all the packages, and running check health over and over again until everything is set up.

I just copy my neovim.nix file over (also other things like zsh.nix) and run home-manager switch

You don’t have to use NixOS to take advantage of its benefits.

gramgan ,

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

Telorand ,

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

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.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

I recently installed Bazzite exclusively for gaming but I need to read more about Atomic distro.

chameleon ,
@chameleon@fedia.io avatar

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.

thurstylark ,

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.

bsergay ,

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.

demesisx ,
@demesisx@infosec.pub avatar

I do this in combination with Nix-Darwin for one of my machines. I also have some Kubernetes clusters and RISC-V machines running bare metal executables using NixOS-Anywhere and some other stuff.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

That does not sound like some basic stuff though. 😆

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Hm I see, thanks. A good one when you have it installed on every machine.

pinganini ,

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

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

ferngully ,

Chezmoi has an amazing templating feature to address different files on different machines. It’s worth the time to set up.

jutty ,

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.

data1701d ,
@data1701d@startrek.website avatar

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.

demesisx ,
@demesisx@infosec.pub avatar

Perhaps you’re tired of hearing it but this is very close to exactly how NixOS works with home manager.

data1701d ,
@data1701d@startrek.website avatar

Quite honestly, I almost chose NixOS over Debian a few years for that reason, but I prefer the community support of Debian. Of course, that could change, but right now, I’m not in a big distro-hopping mood nor am I sufficiently unhappy with Debian. On a side note, it kind of bothered me that you couldn’t use Nix to configure e.g the layout of your XFCE desktop. If I ever transition, maybe I’ll put in some time one summer to make that all work.

hperrin ,

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.

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