[quectophoton]

> I just keep my dotfiles repo in the same tree structure as the home directory, and loop over the tree to create symlinks.

Depending on the use case, the `/etc/skel` directory (and equivalents depending on the distro/OS) might be useful. When creating a user, the files in $HOME are copied from such "skeleton" directory, and there's usually a way to tell that command to use a different skeleton directory.

So a different way (not better, just different) would be to have a directory already setup with symlinks and all, and use that directory as the skeleton when creating the user, so its $HOME gets created all ready with symlinks and all.