Two passes, both aimed at a consistent experience rather than a faithful
snapshot of each machine's accidents.
Standardisation. Audited every host-layer config present on more than one
machine and asked whether the difference was intent or drift:
- mpv was byte-identical; swayimg differed only because system76 still
had the shipped default and the work laptop had the real config; bob
differed by one setting the work laptop was simply missing.
- user-dirs.dirs disagreed with BOTH machines and with zshenv, which has
said $HOME/downloads all along. Standardised on that.
- mimeapps.list is now the union of both machines' associations.
- swaync's config and style are shared; only wallust's generated
colors.css stays per host, alongside hypr's and waybar's.
All of the above moved to common/.
Dropped as pure state rather than config: gtk-2.0 (file-chooser geometry),
pavucontrol.ini (window size), zoom.conf (a per-install random_key) and
zoomus.conf (panel widths). gtk-3.0 stays per host — its bookmarks encode
the two different home directories.
App config. GIMP, inkscape, FreeCAD, cura, OrcaSlicer, LightBurn and OBS
all hold real settings, so a curated subset of each is now tracked:
settings, keybindings and user content, but not session state, tool
options, device lists or window geometry. kicad is skipped — both library
tables hold a single entry, i.e. untouched defaults.
Content lives once in common/ even when only one machine has the app; the
host configs decide who gets the link. That is the distinction that lets
53% of link sources be shared while the NAS still does not get GIMP.
Two exclusions on credential grounds: obs-studio/plugin_config holds a
websocket server_password, and gh is dropped entirely because `gh auth
login` writes a token into hosts.yml — now also blocked by name.
Five directories swept in held no files — matplotlib, three gtk dirs and
one mpv. Git cannot represent an empty directory, so they existed on
mainframe where they were created but vanished on clone, and system76's
install failed with "Nonexistent target".
install now checks every link source exists before running dotbot, so this
surfaces on the machine that introduced it rather than the next one to
pull.
Reactive capture missed wallust entirely, so this is a systematic pass over
~/.config on all four machines: every entry that is not already a symlink,
judged on whether it is hand-authored config or app-generated state.
Shared and identical everywhere -> common/: lazygit, ncmpcpp, neofetch,
matplotlib. Everything else differs per machine and goes in
hosts/<host>/config/: gtk-2.0/3.0/4.0, mimeapps.list, user-dirs.dirs,
mpv, swaync, swayimg, bob, pavucontrol.ini, zoom; plus beets, bottom,
glow and mpd on system76; fastfetch, gh, uv, traggo, tiling-assistant and
xdg-desktop-portal on the work laptop; inbox-tidy and llmfit on mainframe.
Deliberately excluded, all verified to hold live credentials: the work
laptop's Claude OAuth tokens (~/.config/anthropic/credentials), the NAS
restic repo password and hetzner.env, subsonic passwords in subtui, stmp
and termsonic, mopidy, supersonic, the Proton bridge env and the LiteLLM
virtual keys. The ignore list now names those shapes directly — a bare
`password` file would not have been caught before.
Also excluded as generated state or too large to be meaningful: GIMP,
kicad, BambuStudio, OrcaSlicer, calibre, LightBurn, obs-studio, feishin,
libreoffice, VirtualBox, FortiClient; and mainframe's dead X11-era
leftovers (i3, openbox, lxpanel, lxsession, pcmanfm).
The router resolves it to 10.0.0.2 at the DNS level and the remote URL
already carries :2222, so the alias was redundant everywhere and wrong on
mainframe, where it pointed at localhost. Verified: connecting with
-F /dev/null succeeds from both mainframe and system76.
pkg-snapshot and dots used plain sort, which is locale-dependent: the same
package set ordered differently on two machines, so dots reported drift
that did not exist. A maintenance tool that always cries wolf is the exact
failure mode dots exists to avoid.
The laptops are on different Hyprland versions — system76 on 0.55.4,
the work laptop on 0.54.3 — and the option was removed in 0.55. Taking the
work laptop's config as canonical therefore introduced a config error on
system76 that did not exist before.
It is redundant either way: 0.54.3 reports the default as already enabled.
This is the first case of the shared config needing to tolerate two
compositor versions; it will not be the last.
Git reads both, and ~/.gitconfig wins. Linking only the XDG path left the
stale ~/.gitconfig in charge, so system76 kept signing commits as a
previous employer even after the cutover appeared to succeed — the symlink
was correct and had no effect.
Putting the whole ssh config in common/ was wrong twice over. It mapped
git.rcjohnstone.com to localhost:2222, which is only true on mainframe
where Gitea runs -- on system76 it broke git entirely. And it replaced a
77-line file holding 13 personal host aliases (storagebox, several
forwarded localhost ports, older work hosts) with a five-entry fleet list.
common/ssh/config now Includes ~/.ssh/config.local first, so host entries
win on the first-value-obtained rule, and carries only the fleet aliases.
Each host keeps its own list; system76's is restored verbatim.
The laptops are themed by wallust, whose config and five templates lived
only in ~/.config/wallust on each machine. A fresh install would have had
no colours at all: hyprland.conf sources colors.conf on its first line and
waybar's style.css imports colors.css on its first line, and nothing in
the repo generated either. Both generated files are now linked per host so
bootstrap works, and wallust writes back through the symlinks.
update_colors.sh was its predecessor and is now actively harmful: it
writes sway/config and wofi/style.css, neither of which exists on any
machine any more, and it regenerates waybar/style.css from a template that
was never carried across -- so running it would have overwritten the
shared Hyprland waybar style with sway-era output.
common/colors (255 theme files, 1.1 MB) was only ever its input.
The earlier survey grepped for the exact package name and concluded the
binding in hyprland.conf was dead. It is not: system76 has it from AUR as
networkmanager-dmenu-git, and the work laptop carries the upstream script
in its own bin. The $mainMod+W binding already works on both.
Adding the repo package to system76.pacman would have made pkg-restore
install it alongside the AUR one — both ship /usr/bin/networkmanager_dmenu,
so pacman would have refused with a file conflict.
dotbot does not carry a `defaults` block between config files, so the
host configs ran without force/relink and refused to replace paths that
already existed as real files — the opencode profiles, the Claude files,
the sunshine config and the old systemd units all failed to link. Each
host config now restates the block.
ddns.timer used OnCalendar=*-*-*/2, which systemd rejects: a day-of-month
step needs an explicit start value. The retired cron line was
`0 2 */2 * *`, so the correct spelling is *-*-1/2.
Replaces the previous repo, which had split into two histories that never
met (mainframe on a dead GitLab remote, the laptops on Gitea) with 146
dirty files across three machines and the NAS never enrolled at all.
Branch-per-machine is gone. One main, with host differences expressed as
small files under hosts/<hostname>/ rather than as branches, so there is
nothing to merge. The reconciled zsh layer reduces 15-33 line forks to
1-7 effective lines per host; distro differences (oh-my-zsh prefix,
syntax-highlighting path, fd vs fdfind) are probed in common/ instead.
Fresh history: the old one carried six plaintext credentials, 45 MB of
mail caches, browser caches and vendored binaries. 5,096 tracked files
and 144 MB become 462 files and 2.6 MB. The .gitignore is now an
allowlist, which is what keeps that true.
Root cause of the rot: ~/.local/bin was a symlink to scripts/ with GOPATH
inside it, so every go install wrote into version control (2.2 GB on the
work laptop). PATH now points at the repo instead of the reverse.
Also: Hyprland replaces sway and is sourced in two halves so $browser is
defined before use; singleton automations carry ConditionHost= alongside
host-layer-only placement; ddns moves from cron to a guarded timer;
package manifests and pkg-snapshot/pkg-restore replace the X11-era
install_scripts/; networkmanager-dmenu added to system76 (the binding
always existed, the package never did).
connor