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!
Perhaps you’re tired of hearing it but this is very close to exactly how NixOS works with home manager.
Quite honestly, I almost chose NixOS over Debian a few years for that reason, but I prefer the community support of Debian. Of course, that could change, but right now, I’m not in a big distro-hopping mood nor am I sufficiently unhappy with Debian. On a side note, it kind of bothered me that you couldn’t use Nix to configure e.g the layout of your XFCE desktop. If I ever transition, maybe I’ll put in some time one summer to make that all work.