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?
there’s like a million ways. ansible, copy /home with btrfs, just make a shell script that rsyncs everything, bare git repo, gnu stow, use nix os, etc.
personally, i just use a shell script to restore everything from an encrypted rclone local backup (although i also backup to a server). i do this because writing the shell script was so easy because my data is very well organized.
that’s probably the best advice i can give you – if your data is well-organized and free of junk (duplicates, broken files, useless files, etc) then that goes a long way towards streamlining any restore scheme.