How have you automated configuring your machines in terms of packages and dotfiles so it works cross-distro?
How have you automated configuring your machines in terms of packages and dotfiles so it works cross-distro?
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!
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i’ve used Chezmoi for years now pretty successfully. works on my Mac and Linux machines. it probably could be made to work on Windows. i am transitioning to NixOS, but i’ll probably keep using it anyway, since i still have Macs for work (and because they’re great laptops don’t @ me). the only real downside is that it only works for the home folder, so i have to manually control stuff for
/etc, but i generally prefer user configuration for most tools anyway.i had messed around with Ansible for this in the past, but i didn’t really like it for this use case. it’s been a while tho so it’s hard to say why.
not to pile on, but you might also look at GNU Stow. i decided against it, but it’s there.
obligatory i s’pose: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles
I’m not a Mac fan, but I do keep a Hackintosh VM with GPU passthrough to run the occasional XCode and the like or send a text message when I’m too lazy to pull out my iPhone. I will say that MacOS’s standardized interface is rather nice, though.
Wow, you went through hell with this Hacintosh. Interesting that you have an iPhone not Android when you use Linux.
On one hand, I did go through heck at one point trying to get the config.plist right to no avail. I then found some guy’s preconfigured OpenCore image made specifically for virtual machines (I usually avoid such things, but as a VM is basically a standardized platform, I’ll take it), upon which my life has been very easy ever since. Passthrough was just a matter of copying my Windows passthrough scripts.
One day, I want to buy a Google Pixel and run LineageOS, but I’m not in the position to do that right now.
Oh, do you have a steps to reproduce it?
I'm writing from [GrapheneOS] (https://grapheneos.org/) right now. I recommend it more over LineageOS as it seemed more polished and profiled. I have OnePlus 7 Pro with LineageOS MicroG though.
For the GPU passthrough, I reused what I did for Windows 10. After that, I think you have to add a few QEMU flags in the Virt Manager XML (have to find them), but after that, you just download an OpenCore ISO from https://github.com/thenickdude/KVM-Opencore and it pretty much just works (except for audio, which is something I’m working ob. I got a Pulse server running on MacOS once and forwarded it to my Linux sound server over the virtual network, but I haven’t been able to replicate that.) Every few months, they’ll update it with the latest OpenCore.
Yeah I see everyone saying chezmoi is great.
Ansible seems fine but also complicate many thing not doing something in bash.
GNU Stow seems even more complication than Ansible.
Bash seems the most simplest one.