Funny you say this, I'm in the middle of configuring a new desktop for my own use. I've written puppet manifests to configure the desktop, install the tools, e

Funny you say this, I'm in the middle of configuring a new desktop for my own use. I've written puppet manifests to configure the desktop, install the tools, etc. I solemnly swear I'll keep it up to date, but then again I said the same thing with the system I'm replacing - which I'd configured with ansible. At the very least all my dotfiles and projects are stored in git, so mostly getting a workable system is trivial - it's things like setting up arduino-studio, firefox (installed from binary releases to /opt, because I want to be current), and similar niggles that are hard. I can configure hundreds of servers with puppet, but desktops tend to be used for so much adhoc work that is hard to script, that keeping them current and automated is a lot of work. (e.g. My wife suddenly says "I want XXXX", so I login and set it up, then forget about it for a few years.)