Hi everyone,

I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.

I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.

Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.

Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).

So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.

I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.

What distribution could meet my needs?

  • @darkan15
    16•2 months ago

    I’m going to mention Ansible as I haven’t seen it mentioned, and it can be used to locally manage a reproducible build.

    It has already been mentioned, but as a minimum to replicate your system you need two things:

    • Transfer/copy your entire /home directory as there is where the majority of the configuration files of your system pertaining the software you use (there could be configs you could need on /etc and on /usr/local or other dir), that is why it is recommended to partition your disk on installation of your distro, so the /home directory is already separated, as if you reinstall in the same machine you don’t lose any configuration in addition to your personal documents/pictures/etc
    • Have a way to automatically install a list of programs/apps/drivers/libraries, and that is what something like a bash script, Ansible, nixOs, etc. could help you with.

    The truth is that using any of the tools in the second point requires learning a bunch, so if your skill level is still not there, there is some work to do to get there.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•2 months ago

      I’m going to mention Ansible

      Oh for the love of god, don’t. Ansible is 2002 technology used in 2024. It’s so clunky and janky that I’m relieved I can get chatgpt to boilerplate my stuff and save me time actually staring at fucking YAML all day. Use Anything Else before your brain rots.

      source: it’s like half my day job now and I should’ve charged more.

      • @darkan15
        2•2 months ago

        What would you recommend that is not NixOS or a Bash script and can be used agnostic of distro?