[tyil]

I've tried Ansible multiple times. Every time it seemed to cost more effort to do something simple, and once you start mixing OSs, things get much more complicated very quickly.

> It can stream shell commands so you've got all the usual sed awk etc

I can write a couple lines of yaml which includes the line of sed/awk/whatever, or just write the one line of sed/awk/whatever.

> And has a battle tested OS detection logic built in.

You can get pretty far with just checking /etc/os-release, and you'll need only a fraction of the code Ansible brings to do that. Ansible might do a _slightly_ better job, but the increased complexity is definitely not worth it.

> And can copy in different templates depending on OS.

Yes, it can do this, and I have done this. It's a lot of boilerplate YAML you'll need _every_ time you want to write any playbook. It's just not worth the ridiculous amount of hoop-jumping for something which seems to me to be a rather straightforward use case.