Ask HN: How do you sync or migrate KDE settings?

Inspired by today's post on Ubuntu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49908757

I use KDE at home, and installed (K)ubuntu on a separate laptop to use for work stuff (Yocto). It's a bit tedious to have to go into system settings and click through menus to configure e.g. middle-click settings, alt-tab settings, sleep/wake/lock behavior, Dolphin toolbar/views, etc, every time I set up a machine.

Some options I've seen: Konsave (https://github.com/Prayag2/konsave); KDE Migrant (https://github.com/nekromoff/kde-migrant); a guide to writing your own kwriteconfig scripts in Plasma 5 (https://tylerkontra.com/posts/programmatic-kde-customization/).

For NixOS users there's plasma-manager (https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager) but obviously can't use that on e.g. Kubuntu.

I haven't looked too much into dotfile management (e.g. GNU Stow or Chezmoi) but maybe they are options as well?

Just looking to get ideas and suggestions from the HN crowd.

1 comment

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silverbluep 28d ago ↗

I don't have solutions for you; i want to also keep my KDE settings saved. But I'm full on nixos and home manager so I'm going plasma manager route.

Technically you could use plasma-manager on any distro; you install nix, and use home-manager standalone. I think with KDE; you would want to skip package management, but doable; I used to do with arch.

I guess depends on what you already use for configuration management. Bear in mind; a lot of KDE apps do store state information (window size etc.) inside the config directory and there wasn't an easy way to disentangle config from state when I used to manage my config with a git repo.