I’ve been dual-booting since the early-oughts, but I’m only just now preparing to delete my Windows partition for good.

What with all the repartitioning in my future, I figure it’s a good time to just make a clean start - reinstall from scratch. …but I have about a decade’s worth of tools and dotfile tweaks accumulated, including things like updates to xorg.conf to support my old (but awesome) mouse.

So… What’s your favored toolset to get your machine back to the way you like it?

I’ve done this all manually many a time, backing up my home dir, writing scripts to install software, copy important config files into place, etc.

How do you like to go about reinstalling your programs, restoring .dotfiles and config?

  • spauldo@lemmy.ml
    8·
    1 year ago

    I just tar up /home and /etc, install the new system, untar my backup to a directory inside my home directory, and then copy only the stuff I wanted to keep.

    I see a fresh install as an opportunity for a new start.

  • andybug@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    I use chezmoi for tracking dotfiles and used to use a fancy Ansible setup. Now, I just occasionally backup a list of explicitly installed packages and track the major changes made to the system in a simple Markdown file.

  • fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m a /home on separate drive/partition kind of guy. I like it just following my installs. Though seeing some using guix/nixos to create a config for my desktop has got me wanting to spend a weekend trying that out.

    • swordsmanluke@programming.devOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s been my approach too, but I’ve reached ten plus years of God knows what in my dotfiles. It’s time for a clean reinstall. 😁

    • fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      The rest, ansible for any sufficiently complex enough setup at the moment. Good for integration work with LDAP, etc if your using that. Again may play around with guix on that front.