Ask HN: What are you all using to automate desktop setup and config?

Sadly, I'm proceeding through a manual exercise of this sort now.

Since a few hours has passed and nobody has anything, I'm kinda assuming that nothing so great really exists. Maybe just write a shell script? Hard to test obviously.

Maybe Ansible?

Nothing.

I’ve found that I do this infrequently enough that the cost of doing writing and testing code to automate it isn’t worth it.

I’ve found that others do this infrequently enough and with enough variation of preferences that there isn’t a framework which is sufficiently well-documented to reduce the above cost.

Backup and restore from another machine?

I’ve had enough Ansible pain for multiple lifetimes. I might use Chef, but certainly not Ansible.

NixOS

I'd also use Ansible, but installing browser extensions, and pairing bluetooth is a bit more difficult, those probably require a different strategy/tool.

If you don't mind me blowing my own horn: I wrote this project that started off as a way to let me re-install new development machines with a single command, 'freckles' ( https://freckles.io ).

It uses Ansible under the hood, but configuration is simpler, all you'd need is a single text file containing something like:

    - packages-installed:
        packages:                                                          
          - net-tools                                                                
          - vlc                                                                      
          - sshfs                                                                    
    - file-with-content:                                                           
        path: /home/nancy/.gitconfig                                             
        content: |                                                                
          [user]                                                                 
          email = email@exmple                                                   
          name = Nancy Drew                                                      
    - file-with-content:                                                           
        path: /home/nancy/.tmux.conf                                             
        content: |                                                               
          unbind C-b                                                             
          set -g prefix `                                                        
          bind-key ` send-prefix 

Choosing pre-made tasks from: https://freckles.io/frecklets/default or create your own (for example, there is none for installing steam currently, but I'm happy to add those over time when users request them -- the nice thing is those only need to be written once).

Then execute the thing with:

    frecklecute <your_file>
 

It's smart enough to figure out whether it needs to ask for root and such. It needs (and autoinstalls if required) a minimal Python and rsync on the target machine, and it creates and installs some other helper tools into $HOME/.local/share/freckles, but that can be deleted after a run if necessary.

There's quite a bit more to it, but that'd be the simplest way to use it. The main thing really is that you can keep your machine specific configuration in a single, easy-to-read and -create file, and you only need one single command to apply it to your machine.

EDIT: anybody know how to format code blocks on here so they render on mobile properly?

I do this pretty frequently, and I've written quite a few bash scripts to rebuild my preferred environments for my Mac, Ubuntu boxes, raspberry pis, etc.

It's open source too: https://github.com/fastily/autobots

A very simple bash script that installs some stuff through Homebrew, sets my default shell to Zsh and copies over some files into my home directory. It's open source: https://github.com/mijndert/dotfiles

Shell script that sets OS defaults, copies configs, sets up symlinks and installs software package managers.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

sudo apt install [all the packages I want]

I'm usually working 100% in the terminal (raspi, VPS, WSL, etc), and the defaults are fine.