wow - this is really cool, and it is a great initiative. If someone would take a similar approach to installing (on linux) a particular version of ElementaryOS

wow - this is really cool, and it is a great initiative. If someone would take a similar approach to installing (on linux) a particular version of ElementaryOS or linux, and puts together a set of recipes that would get it all souped up for development etc, that would be really great!! One can even take it further to use an OS like Bodhi Linux which seems stripped down for the task, and use ansible instead of the native scripting etc. One can get a superb development environment even with an older lower powered laptop; a lot of the grunt work can be automated away. This has to be an open-sourced effort because a thousand combinations are possible and one needs a easy way to select what one needs, and this was my issue with ninite. It would install everything, and it also would configure etc .