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!
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 become a Flatpak fan for a similar reason.
Distrobox?
Do they also embed the configuration inside of them? But for many dependencies and binaries I don’t think that would be a good case scenario compared to package manager.
There are cases where AppImages aren’t viable indeed, like with programs that require ring 0 access. But limitations exist for all formats, so perhaps another good alternative is having multiple versions of a given program, like downloading the equivalent deb package through apt while also keeping the appimage version. It would bloat the storage for a potential automated configuration, but it should help with ensuring compatibility.