Lots of devs use Ansible configs to have any new machine or reinstall ready in ten minutes. It’s mostly just ‘these apps need to be installed’ and ‘these config files need to be written’, which are a no-brainer to add. The most annoying part is figuring out how to do things with the desktop environment, like install widgets or remap the keyboard.

One benefit of this approach is that I never forget what I fiddled somewhere: I can just look through my config for the particular setting. I have the config for the machine that I set up about ten years ago and which has been chugging along as a server since then — and I won’t need to poke around like an amnesiac should I decide to change something.

Notably, this and dotfiles are popular among devs using Mac, since MacOS has nearly all settings available either via config files or the defaults system from the command line. In comparison, Windows is total ass about configuring via the command line, and even Cinnamon gives me some headache by either not reloading or straight up overwriting my settings.