This is a good one, I hope I'll have mine for that long (started 2019).

Personally, I stopped worrying about dotfiles and GNU stow after joining the cult of Nix. While I gave honest attempt to everything else, Nix made it stick. Now I only have one single repo, where In write config for (almost) all of my applications in Nix, deploy them with Nix, rollback with Nix etc. Compared to hodgepodge of INI/YAML/TOML/XML/JSON/WHATHAVEYOU it is nice to to only have single tool to worry about.

I wished Guix had the momentum and size of Nixpkgs. I'd much prefer a Lisp than the language contraption of Nix.

ewuhic

Can one use the benefits of Nix provisioning while using other linux distro, Debian specifically?

mschwaig

If you are talking about provisioning dot files and command line applications you want to have available on all you machines then take a look at home-manager.

https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

I use it on NixOS. It should absolutely work on other distros unfortunately I don't have any first hand experience with that or with what the best way is to set it up on other distos (I think there are few options for how to do it).