I’ve been dual-booting since the early-oughts, but I’m only just now preparing to delete my Windows partition for good.

What with all the repartitioning in my future, I figure it’s a good time to just make a clean start - reinstall from scratch. …but I have about a decade’s worth of tools and dotfile tweaks accumulated, including things like updates to xorg.conf to support my old (but awesome) mouse.

So… What’s your favored toolset to get your machine back to the way you like it?

I’ve done this all manually many a time, backing up my home dir, writing scripts to install software, copy important config files into place, etc.

How do you like to go about reinstalling your programs, restoring .dotfiles and config?

  • Muddybulldog
    13•1 year ago

    My entire .dotfiles is in GitHub. Anything I want to keep common across machines is stored there and either inserted in PATH or symlinked as needed.

    • Jamie
      10•1 year ago

      Second this, just be mindful not to sync anything sensitive in there.

        • Muddybulldog
          1•1 year ago

          Stow is good and I’d recommend it for someone starting out. By the time I found about it I had already written a silly amount of code from scratch to accomplish effectively the same thing.

          • dpflug
            0•1 year ago

            @muddybulldog
            After using a small install script of my own for a while, I switched to yadm. It’s nice because it’s a shell script, so no need to compile on different architectures/UNIXen.

            • Muddybulldog
              1•1 year ago

              Thanks for this. Someone else has mentioned this a while back and I completely forgot what it was called. Which is ironic given what the acronym stands for. I’ll give it a second look.