Hi all,
I am about to do a bit of a distro hop, and I am looking at Fedora and its spins, after years on Debian / POP.
I am not looking forward to setting it all up again, it’s a drag.
I wonder, is there a tool that lets me script installs?
I’ll want to check if application exists, and if so, update, otherwise, install. That kind of thing.
Things like:
- Telegram
- Joplin
- Docker
- Firefox
- Ungoogle Chromium
- Sublime Text
- VSCodium
- Keepass
- Thunderbird
- DBeaver
- Gimp
- Inkscape
- KDENLive
- Syncthing
- Steam
- VLC
- Localsend
- Flameshot
- Element
- Cherrytree
- Calibre
- Anydesk
I show the list, only to give an idea of what might be involved.
I’m new to Fedora, so not sure how it differs beyond the package manager. But, thought I’d ask.
Does such a tool exist, and is it worth my time? I can practice on a VM before trying on the final install/s.
Thank you
Some distros allow this. Nix for example allows you to save config files that describe your entire system (apps, settings, etc) and then load them in one go. Other distros are following suit with their own tailored solutions too (I think Ubuntu might have something? Manjaro?).
I did more than 5 installs this weekend (for … reasons) and the “trick” IMHO is …
Do NOT install things ahead of actually needing them. (of course this assume things take minutes to install and thus you will have connectivity)
For me it meant Firefox was top of the list, VLC or Steam (thus NVIDIA driver) second, vim as I had to edit crontab, etc.
Quite a few are important to me but NOT urgent, e.g Cura (for 3D printer) and OpenSCAD (for parametric design) or Blender. So I didn’t event install them yet.
So IMHO as other suggested docker/docker-compose but only for backend.
Now… if you really want a reproducible desktop install : NixOS. You declare your setup rather than
apt install -y
and “hope” it will work out. Honestly I was tempted but as install a fresh Debian takes me 1h and I do it maybe once a year, at most, no need for me (yet).Another “trick” I use is having an ~/Apps directory in which I have AppImage, binaries, etc that I can bring from an old /home to a new one. It’s not ideal, bypassing the package manager, and makes quite a few assumption, first architecture, but in practice, it works.
Using ansible will help you on your 2nd, 3rd , nth install.
But getting ansible to do what you want (plus testing) for the first time would takes 10x longer than manual install.
I think there’s xkcd about that.
Just installing applications is pretty easy though.
--- - hosts: localhost become: yes tasks: - name: Install required software dnf: state: latest name: - firefox - telegram - calibre
ansible-playbook install.yml
Something like that (untested)
You could write yourself a bash script to do this.
This ended up working perfectly
Awesome!
I have a bash script I use to script my Silverblue install. Something like this should work.
# space-separated list of packages to install S_RPM_PACKAGES_TO_INSTALL="pkg1 pkg2 pkg3" # function to install the packages dnf_install () { sudo dnf install -y $1 } # call to function, passing the list dnf_install "$S_RPM_PACKAGES_TO_INSTALL"
I have it set up this way so that I just have a bunch of bash variables describing the stuff I want to install all at the top of the file, but the function definitions and calls lower down since I don’t need to see them.
It also does other things like removes packages from the system, removes some preinstalled flatpaks, installs flatpaks from Fedora Flatpaks / Flathub / gnome-nightly, and sets up gnome through a list
gsettings
commands.As I use my system, I add new apps to the list I want next time I install and remove apps I don’t use.
I love this, I will update the script I’ve setup to mirror your idea. Nice and clean.
I wonder if you can help at all? The only app that fails install is Anydesk. I have to do the following:
# Anydesk sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/anydesk.repo<<EOF [anydesk] name=AnyDesk Fedora Linux baseurl=http://rpm.anydesk.com/fedora/x86_64/ gpgcheck=1 repo_gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://keys.anydesk.com/repos/RPM-GPG-KEY EOF
sudo dnf install anydesk -y
But it gives an error, saying :
[anydesk] name=AnyDesk Fedora Linux baseurl=http://rpm.anydesk.com/fedora/x86_64/ gpgcheck=1 repo_gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://keys.anydesk.com/repos/RPM-GPG-KEY AnyDesk Fedora Linux 397 B/s | 488 B 00:01 AnyDesk Fedora Linux 1.8 kB/s | 1.7 kB 00:00 Importing GPG key 0xCDFFDE29: Userid : "philandro Software GmbH <[email protected]>" Fingerprint: D563 11E5 FF3B 6F39 D5A1 6ABE 18DF 3741 CDFF DE29 From : https://keys.anydesk.com/repos/RPM-GPG-KEY AnyDesk Fedora Linux 796 B/s | 1.2 kB 00:01 Error: Problem: conflicting requests - nothing provides libgtkglext-x11-1_0-0 needed by anydesk-6.3.2-1.x86_64 from anydesk (try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages)
Is there a special way to add that kind of command to a bash script? All good apart from that though.
I think that’s just a dependency issue unrelated to the script.
ok, thank you. I’ll address that, in that case. Thanks again!
EDIT, and resolved. Thanks again.
I do use docker, and compose a lot. But can it be used for desktop apps? Telegram, gimp, Thunderbird, etc?
It should be possible. Although probably very complicated. Have a look at https://distrobox.it/. It allows you to tightly integrate containers into your desktop, including accelerated graphics, some devices, your homedir, etc. It can even automatically install desktop shortcuts. (You can disable the integrations of course) Even tho it uses Podman instead of docker, AFAIK it should be 1:1 compatible with docker for your usecase.
Something like Ansible won’t help you the first time around, but it’ll make the next times easier.
It can make the first time around easy if you use the proper plugin
Docker, docker and docker compose
Probably would be better to move to full kubernetes but it does have a strong learning curve
Have you tried SaveDesktop? Thought It is limited in the flatpak softwares, but cloud synchronization feature is recently added.
I use yadm’s post-checkout script feature to accomplish this on my machines.
Or any of the similar tools listed here, based on personal preferences! I currently use Chezmoi, but I like that they help you discover alternatives.
I use an Ansible playbook to do fresh install stuff such as app installs & joining my local Samba AD.
Another option, that I’ve never tried, would be to put your /home directory on another partition. That only solves the settings though and not your app installation bit.
Do you use Windows?
I daily drive Debian and use Windows for work. Only have one Windows VM for playing games via Moonlight.