A place to share, discuss & comment the window manager experience.
When one spend enough time using window managers configuration files can pile up fast.. How do you keep them safe?
Much of them are generated, if you use gnu stow, you can keep the ones you want more easily.
Then, you can commit the stow directory with git.
What do you mean by "generated"?
Most applications, if there is not dotfile config in $XDG_HOME/.config or $HOME, will generate dotfiles with sane defaults.
When I switched distros often it was routine for me to erase the dotfiles specific to say, GNOME or Plasma, as they'd then be restored to default settings.
I have three backups:
Nix as the config tool + git. I use the same repo for all my systems so all my devices back each other up on top of the hosted git repo.
Oh nice! I would switch to to NixOS for all those goodies but it is above my pay grade jejeje. I saw some time ago a fork of NixOS designed for not-so-tech-savy users so I have been checking it ever so often.
I won't lie, it was a learning curve. That said you don't have to go full blown nixos. I use nix + home manager to manage my macOS and Ubuntu user dotfiles.
You can also use nix per project with dev shells and direnv to automatically load the dev shell when in the repo.
I maintain a nix config for my work's repo and it keeps everyone (Mac or Linux) on the exact same version of our tooling (node, python, bash, etc.).
dood, i backup all my files.
you can't just backup your dotfiles. you should at least backup your non-distro files, too. ideally the whole system, so you can quickly restore when something really bad happens.
i backup to external drives (usb thumbdrive and external HD) and then keep the backups in other rooms. some encrypted, very important files i sync additionally to a cloud provider, in case the whole appartment burns down or so while I'm out.