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!

    • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
      14·
      3 months ago

      I do this in combination with Nix-Darwin for one of my machines. I also have some Kubernetes clusters and RISC-V machines running bare metal executables using NixOS-Anywhere and some other stuff.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    16·
    3 months ago

    And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment

    If you know about NixOS, then you probably know this, but Nix, the package manager/the language behind NixOS, is cross-platform.

    I daily drive NixOS, but I also use Nix (and home-manager) on my Fedora music laptop, my Ubuntu home file-server, and my work Windows machine (WSL) to install and configure neovim automatically instead of copying a config, installing all the packages, and running check health over and over again until everything is set up.

    I just copy my neovim.nix file over (also other things like zsh.nix) and run home-manager switch

    You don’t have to use NixOS to take advantage of its benefits.

    • Psyhackological@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      3 months ago

      It always seemed to me like Nix package manager is not “native” enough or there are some downsides compared to dnf or apt. If that’s not the case I think I’ve got my answer.

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
        3·
        3 months ago

        From an outsider perspective (I haven’t used Nix at all), the downsides I see are that it’s extra software on top of the defaults for any given distro, it’s not optimized for the distro (meaning it might pull in dependencies that already exist or not use distro specific APIs/libs), and it doesn’t adhere to the motivations of the distro (e.g. not adhering to the DFSGs for Debian).

        And of course, most of the packages are community maintained and there’s the immutability, which might be a hinderance to some use cases, but not for me.

        All in all, not really the worst if you’re not worried about space or getting the absolute most in performance and not an ideologue, but it’s enough to make me stick with APT. I chose Debian because of its commitment to FOSS, not the stability nor performance.

  • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
    7·
    3 months ago

    I haven’t. But having my home dir be a git repo helps a great deal. The rest I install when I need it

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 months ago

    I’ve tried to move as much as I can into Flatpak. That way I can just copy my .var folder, and all my apps are migrated.

    For other things like my configs, I use a git repo.

  • chrash0@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 months ago

    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

    • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Psyhackological@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        3 months ago

        Wow, you went through hell with this Hacintosh. Interesting that you have an iPhone not Android when you use Linux.

        • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              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.

    • Psyhackological@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      3 months ago

      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.

  • Auster@lemm.ee
    5·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Psyhackological@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Auster@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 months ago

        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.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 months ago

    Most of my files are different across machines because of different themes etc. The only dotfiles I have synced across machines are my .zshrc, .gitconfig, .ideavimrc (not my actual vimrc because it has some machine-specific theming), and .p10k.zsh. I have them all in a folder synced with syncthing and then I symlink ~/.zshrc to e.g. ~/dotfiles/.zshrc.

  • chameleon@fedia.io
    3·
    3 months ago

    My dotfiles aren’t distro-specific because they’re symlinks into a git repo (or tarball) + a homegrown shell script to make them, and that’s about the end of it.

    My NixOS configuration is split between must-have CLI tools/nice-to-have CLI tools/hardware-related CLI tools/GUI tools and functions as a suitable reference for non-Nix distros, even having a few comments on what the package names are elsewhere, but installation is ultimately still manual.

  • Takios@discuss.tchncs.de
    3·
    3 months ago

    I use SaltStack to automate my servers. Just feels better than Ansible to me.
    For my PC and laptop I don’t do anything, I haven’t hopped distribution since I started using Tumbleweed a few years ago.

      • Takios@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        3 months ago

        The clear cut of state data, pillar data and formulae feels more intuitive to me than Ansible’s playbook organization.

          • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
            2·
            3 months ago

            ansible claims to be lots of things it’s not. It’s supposed to be idempotent. It’s not, you can execute arbitrary scripts. You don’t need an agent on the machines… but it might just decide to stop supporting your version of python one day. It’s okayish for setting up some machines, but absolutely sucks for maintaining them.