Chezmoi for Distro-Hoppers

A practical, start-to-finish guide to keeping your personal Linux setup reproducible. If you enjoy trying Linux distributions, reinstalling a system, or maintaining more than one machine, you eventually meet the same chore: rebuilding the small choices that make a computer feel like yours. Shell settings, terminal profiles, launcher preferences, text-expansion snippets, and application configuration all live in scattered files—usually “dotfiles”—inside your home directory. chezmoi is a tool for recording the configuration you deliberately want to keep, storing it in a Git repository, and applying it back to a new machine. It does not back up an entire home directory or install every application for you. It is a focused, reviewable way to restore your configuration. Start small. A good first repository might contain .bashrc, a terminal profile, and a few application settings. Add more only after you understand what each file contains. The mental modelchezmoi keeps a source state: the…