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.

Personal git repo with my dotfiles and other aliases/bashrc items.

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.

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

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

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

Or Timeshift everything... and restore on new distro

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

i wasn't able to. Just lut them up on github. but now i have nix so i can just set up flake and git clone. Got my configs.

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

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

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.

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

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.