Linux

I manage them by not. My configs are gone when I wipe my drive and I simply recreate them from memory. Things get forgotten, new things get changed. Holding on to the past too tightly will make you unable to leave it.

I manage them using git and stow.

Stow is very useful, but a bit unknown. Hard to explain in a Lemmy post, but basically it helps you manage symlinks between your git repo directory and your $HOME.

You can "install" and "uninstall" configs by managing the symlinks with stow.

I'm not as fancy as using git. I have a folder with all my config files, and it's not a lot, in Nextcloud. When I'm on a new install, I sync my Nextcloud account then create symlinks to the files in the folder. So far no issues. I just keep track of where each simlink needs to go.

separate nvmes for the root-fs and for my users home folder.

configure /etc/fstab to point nvme to /home/username.

Done! I can wipe and hop as much as I like, and everything's just there.

Tbh, i only hopped once, from Arch to Fedora and it was painless.

not distro-hopping, but i use nix, which can be used on anydistro.

I keep my files in a repo on gitlab and use yadm to sync them.

Yadm is a wrapper around git, so you have all the standard git commands plus some extra to work with templating and encryption etc.

I'm not a distrohopper, but GNU stow is delightfully simple. See my dotfiles as an example.

Home manager fan here. Every install I tweak something if I feel like it.

I use usb stick with Ventoy. I copy it into .config and add a line for aliassrc into .bashrc and I'm all set.

Ansible... Ansible... ansible...

Write a ansible playbook that contain any of the config...

Or Timeshift everything... and restore on new distro

I manage my config files with RCM, this way: https://fedoramagazine.org/managing-dotfiles-rcm/

But I use it for share my dotfiles between my home and my work computer. For distro hopping only, I have my /home mounted in a secondary HD, so it's never formatted.

For the config files in other paths, I keep a log of everything I changed in Dropbox and then I redo. I admit that this may not be the best solution, but the others works good.

I have a git repository in ~/dotfiles, and symbolic link the ones I want as I need them. I've only just started tracking my dotfiles and I'm not super disciplined with it yet, so I still have slightly different setups on each system.

I used to have a git repo on Github for my dotfiles but I took it down when I realized that there are some config files I don't want public like my newsboat links or API keys on my ~/.bashrc. Now I just sync it encrypted to some file storage but I may put it on my private git server instead where password-store lives.

Resilio Sync and symlinks. The symlinks aren't great but I never remember to update git.. Resilio is wonderful.

With great difficulty... And tbh mostly copy-paste to a MEGA sync

I'm not really a distro hopper but I just have my home directory as a git repository with a gitignore file. https://git.sr.ht/~cowingtonpost/dotfiles/tree/main/item/.gitignore

Git clone, cd repo, bin/makelinks.sh

install zsh tmux lsb_release

Relogin, environment works, aliases make everything distro/os agnostic again (spend a lot of time in freebsd and osx), next step is optionally adding ssh key to Auth server to make it privileged, otherwise it's just an insecure drone.

Edit: this last hop was to a much beefier machine on clean debian vs a half-broken proxmox desktop, my lxc scripts have reached the point that proxmox is a hindrance especially with fast vm gfx, but I was lazy and just copied my .mozilla directory.

Amazing, worked flawlessly, my ff configuration is complex with tons of containers and add-ons, they just magically worked and I was still logged in to my websites, I was stunned, keeping that trick from now on.

I don't stow or anything difficult anymore, it complicates things.

I just save everything in my gitlab account and then I manually create the links.

I copy everything in my home folder and paste it all in the new installation. Works well if I stick with the same desktop environment.

Via a script that "automatically" copies (and installs) everything I need to its respective folder.

I really like the simplicity of this workflow by StreakyCobra on HN (explained as a blog post here):

I use:

git init --bare $HOME/.myconf
alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.myconf/ --work-tree=$HOME'
config config status.showUntrackedFiles no

where my ~/.myconf directory is a git bare repository. Then any file within the home folder can be versioned with normal commands like:

config status
config add .vimrc
config commit -m "Add vimrc"
config add .config/redshift.conf
config commit -m "Add redshift config"
config push
And so one…

No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.

I just don't wipe out /home when I reinstall. Same /home partition, different distro on /