dotfriedrice

I've been a long time Windows user (20+ years) who heavily uses WSL 2 as my dev environment with tmux / Neovim but I'm switching to native Linux before the end of this year. I tried once 7 years ago but ran into major audio issues that were a deal breaker but I'm hoping the Linux kernel has improved. I have the same hardware as before. My dotfiles have been public for many years and can 1 shot a new or existing system in a few minutes with a bunch of command line tools on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch (with or without WSL 2) and macOS. It has an install script and theme switching for a long time which I've used to set up a a few systems (personal desktop, laptop and work laptop). I've been casually tweaking a laptop running Arch with niri. I'm preparing a bunch of things in my https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to prepare for that push which will

I use my dotfiles repo for this. For example in my dotfiles repo I'll have `etc/pacman.d/01-options.conf` and the dotfiles install script will symlink that to `/etc/pacman.d/01-options.conf`. This way the source of truth is always in a single dotfiles repo. This strategy has worked well for dotfiles I use on Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. It includes support for WSL 2 too. The install script has been working with this set up for years to run 1 single command and have everything work where work in this case is installing and configuring a bunch of tools I use. An example is here https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

Yep I've been doing this since WSL 1 was available, it's rock solid. My dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles have an install script to automatically get everything (including tmux w/ plugins) set up on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux or macOS. This includes native Linux and WSL 2 support.

7 years ago I posted my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles. 4 years ago I made an install script that worked for Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. This made it easier to get going with them. Over the last week or so I extended and polished that script to make it even easier and customizable, including adding Arch Linux support. The next step is to start installing and configuring GUI tools instead of only focusing on command line tools and environments. I just used it the other day to set up a fresh work laptop in 5 minutes. Given the script is idempotent I run it all the time on my personal box.

Thanks a lot for the reminder. I just pushed an update to remove VcXsrv at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb791... As for why I was using it: I've been using WSL since nearly the beginning (2017 / 2018) and used VcXsrv back then to get bi-directional clipboard sharing before WSLg was available. For a brief time I even ran Sublime Text in WSL 1 way back in the day. Then I used WSL 2. Then I tried WSLg when it first came out and it was really bad. Clipboard sharing didn't work for me which was the only reason I wanted to use it. I set `guiApplications=false` and never looked back. I just tried it again now by closing VcXsrv and removing any DISPLAY related settings I had in my zsh profile. Then I shutdown WSL and started up my instance. Bingo, clipboard sharing "just works" and I also installed xcalc which ran flawl

Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles. Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things. Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too. This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment. Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good