I imagine that things like provisioning are essential to people that switch computers often. So it's not a dotfile-specific problem, but more of a dotfile-adjacent problem.
There's so many interesting edge-cases that affect UX even when distro-hopping between Debian-based distros... especially if you used it for several years and had plenty of custom scripts in your ~/.local/bin folder.
I may yet need to learn or (re)discover some best practices of how to get up to a working development environment faster. I'm thinking of using Guix for that... but I digress.
So far, my workflow goes like this (on a newly-installed distro):
1. Configure environment variables that affect package-specific file locations (/etc/security/pam_env.conf and a custom /etc/profile.d/xdg_std_home.sh script that creates and assigns correct permissions for required directories).
2. Provision packages
3. Deploy config files (using stow).
What I've yet to figure out (haven't really researched it yet), how do you handle app-specific configs (think Firefox add-ons, add-on configs, Thunderbird accounts, etc.)?
"Switch computers often" can also apply to "switch computers with little notice". Even if 95% of my time is spent on one computer, it's nice to know my config is safely squirreled away and, uh, trivially unsquirrelable if something terrible happens to this hardware and I have to get another computer. Seems like a relatively low probability event, but my child has already destroyed two ThinkPads (both were very old and very disposable--still an accomplishment).
As to your last question, nix+home manager gets you there, but that's a whole other Thing.
(n)vim for example: my dotfiles don't vendor the handful of plugins i use, they just include the directives to install those with plugin manager.
I generally use a makefile + stow to handle my dotfiles and home-dir setup. Each program has an entry in this Makefile - most of them are very simple, I keep a list of programs who's dots need to be in ~, and another for ~/.config/ and using make's variable expansion they just get a stow target.
This also allows me to not just copy preference, but provision a bunch of stuff that's invariant across machines (e.g. what i have installed via rustup, go install, etc).
There's so many interesting edge-cases that affect UX even when distro-hopping between Debian-based distros... especially if you used it for several years and had plenty of custom scripts in your ~/.local/bin folder.
I may yet need to learn or (re)discover some best practices of how to get up to a working development environment faster. I'm thinking of using Guix for that... but I digress.
So far, my workflow goes like this (on a newly-installed distro):
1. Configure environment variables that affect package-specific file locations (/etc/security/pam_env.conf and a custom /etc/profile.d/xdg_std_home.sh script that creates and assigns correct permissions for required directories).
2. Provision packages
3. Deploy config files (using stow).
What I've yet to figure out (haven't really researched it yet), how do you handle app-specific configs (think Firefox add-ons, add-on configs, Thunderbird accounts, etc.)?