It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.

Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.

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anuramat 7 hours ago | parent [-]

don't want to be that guy, but have you tried nix?

	▲	spudlyo 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I tried GUIX a few times, but ultimately I couldn't quite get it working exactly the way I wanted it to work. I also didn't like the ugly filesystem layout that the store requires. I may get over it and revisit at some point. It will be a lot of work, but on the plus side I'll have a reason to learn scheme.