I use Ansible for configuration management on my home servers, and recently I started trying to also manage a laptop with it.

For OS installation itself I ended up using a shell script, since that has less depdendencies so it takes less manual steps to run it on a freshly booted ArchISO.

But for things like installing packages, setting up configs in /etc, as well as dotfiles, I'm trying to use ansible.

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I just use git for my home configs.

justine.smithies.me.uk/2023/05…

Same as talpa mentions. But I'm also running NIxOS on one computer now which at least trivializes system setup as programs and their global configs are in one file: /etc/nix/configuration.nix.

Haven't tried the tool (home manager?) for doing the same with your ~/.config/* yet.

But Nix might be a bit much to learn just to make configs portable. Wouldn't recommend it unless you're open to joining the Nix cult.

I just wrote distro packages for my setups. Like seeding dotfiles into /etc/skel and depending on core packages I need for my things.

Makes for quick setup on new machines personally.

Like most replies here I keep a repo with default configs and customisation files.and use this on new systems. But I also serve a few files (via softlinks) to a random folder on my personal website.

For account preference things like my .vimrc or git .config it means I can simply wget them at will no matter where I am. Useful when setting up new user accounts, or working on accounts created by others.

I use ansible plus bash or sometimes just bash. But it is not fully automated or debugged because I don't design new laptops so my volume is low.

I have scripts on github that are public so you don't need secrets on the target machine and can just copy a one liner to start.

I do have a fully cooked minimal example that runs in a vm and installs all dependencies to run a verilog simulation.

github.com/poleguy/protonpack/…

I'm inspired by: blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15…

protonpack/scripts/test_install.sh at main · poleguy/protonpack

Proton Pack Telemetry Capture System. Contribute to poleguy/protonpack development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

my approach is:
1. manually perform a minimal netinstall including an ssh server.
2. use ansible for system config / user setup. I've currently got different roles for servers, Gnome desktop, and sway workstation. ansible is handy for e.g. browser flatpaks that apt can't help with.
3. pull in dotfiles managed with mr/vcsh.

I recently installed a new device (sadly not a reform) and updated the ansible playbook for Trixie. This method is the best I've found for Debian.

bash scripts to get a base bootable system (Arch, so probably not applicable) and Ansible for setting up preferences, scripts, packages, Flatpaks, configs, etc.

I also try to keep the Ansible playbooks as universal as possible so that it works with #postmarketos as well as on Arch.

Similar to the other folks here using Nix, I use Guix for this. (Which does have its frustrations on aarch64 since it's a less common platform, but it's gotten a bit better over time.) For the time being I'm doing this on the Reform Debian images, not running it as its own distro (both Nix and Guix can do this!)

It's nice to have all my machines have effectively the same desktop configuration though 😀