I’m looking for interesting tools to automate managing packaging and configuring everything automated.

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment so I for now know these:

  • Ansible - automating many machines, using different package names as vars and package managers.
  • Bash - the most native and compatible scripting language that can be.
  • Chezmoi - for dotfiles.

For now that’s it. I’m looking forward for your suggestions!

  • Takios
    2·
    1 month ago

    I use SaltStack to automate my servers. Just feels better than Ansible to me.
    For my PC and laptop I don’t do anything, I haven’t hopped distribution since I started using Tumbleweed a few years ago.

      • Takios
        2·
        1 month ago

        The clear cut of state data, pillar data and formulae feels more intuitive to me than Ansible’s playbook organization.

          • vrighter
            2·
            30 days ago

            ansible claims to be lots of things it’s not. It’s supposed to be idempotent. It’s not, you can execute arbitrary scripts. You don’t need an agent on the machines… but it might just decide to stop supporting your version of python one day. It’s okayish for setting up some machines, but absolutely sucks for maintaining them.