Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?

I run Nix and it's a decent experience, but a clear benefit with containerizing user space apps is sandboxing. Sure there are ways to escape docker jail, but it's definitely more sanitary to have isolated filesystems (XSS:ed Electron apps sweeping home directories for secrets etc would have to be more sophisticated).

tl;dr: bash scripts lasts longer than everything else, are easy to maintain, and anybody with basic IT skills can make sense of them. Keep in mind that in an enterprise context, the build system is used and therefore maintained, constantly, and that there's typically a team doing it. At a personal/family level, it's typically you using it, and modifying it if needed, once every other year or so, with literally nobody looking at it in between. Chances are you've done and are doing enough bash that you rarely look up its syntax. When was the last time you used terraform/ansible?

Lindy Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect) says bash will outlive all other recent solution.

Full story I went through this phases:

- full crazy pxe install + Debian/Ubuntu preseed, etc... But still needed some bash scripts. It required a lot of work from one OS version to the next. There were enough changes between versions of the pxe server that I had to revisit its config every time!

- I eventually bought a laptop for one of my kid that didn't support pxe. I installed the base OS with a USB key, and realised how easy it was, and that it was significantly less painful to install half a dozen laptops this way, than fighting my pxe server. My install became USB OS install + well, my good old bash scripts!

- I got involved with ansible very early on and decided to solve both world hunger and global warming with it, but more importantly, my laptop installs. I spent many hours on this. Got it fully automated, and felt great!

- one of my kids' laptop got destroyed, buy a new one, install from USB stick, fumble to install ansible, and realise that ansible has by now changed significantly and my scripts need a lot of work. This is in the middle of the school year, while super busy at work, I just don't have time to deal with this. But, there's a great news: I still have my old bash scripts, and guess what, they still work.

- last upgrade: I went from from my old dozen of bash scripts to this: https://github.com/dorfsmay/laptop-setup-ubuntu-18.04

It is slow-ish, especially some of the manual steps, but not painful enough to make me procrastinate that I delay an upgrade by six months. More significant: I sat down with my kids and get them to upgrade their laptops (which helped a lot to fix my documentation)!

PS: I have zero local files, everything is either on a cloud drive (pCloud), or on github if I want to keep history/share it (eg: my dot files).

With the above, the most difficult step in getting a new system installed is now only typing in the WIFI password, drivers and the filesystem partitions...