During my master's we had assigned desks and mandatory presence 4.9 days a week. Desks would switch about four times a year using a verifiably random scheme, an

During my master's we had assigned desks and mandatory presence 4.9 days a week. Desks would switch about four times a year using a verifiably random scheme, and in addition, there would be projects that we would work on with random people, so we switched desks a lot. Each desk comes with a proper 2-screen desktop setup, so pulling out your laptop was inferior. Via PXE boot, people would regularly reinstall their system for various reasons, so it would regularly be a fresh Ubuntu install. An additional requirement was that others must still be able to work on my system without (m)any quirks. Only a few of us used any sort of automation. Most that did chose Ansible, and all I ever heard from them was cursing on new systems and, between homework, constantly tweaking the deployment script. I'm sure the comments will say Ansible works reliably and painlessly for them, but from what I've seen, it seems to take some time to get into it if you want to setup GUI systems in detail. What worked extremely well for me was a shell script that I grabbed from my server (wget example.com/setup.sh), ran, switched user account, ran step 2 (since it mounts the user's homedir, you don't want to do that while logged in), and then logged back into my real account. After less than 5 minutes of manual work, I had my desired software, the right desktop environment, task bar / alt tab / system tray / clock / etc. settings, and I mounted my homedir on a local server, which was fast enough to painlessly run virtual machines with GUI OSes off of it. I would be as productive and comfortable as on my private laptop after a few minutes of work in the worst case. The script took a few hours to create at first, and with a new Ubuntu release maybe another hour to make it work on the mix of old and new systems. The advantage over other people's setups was that anyone could wipe my system without a second thought (usually you'd have to ask the desk's owner, they'd want to copy files...) and others couldn't snoop through my files (at least, not opportunistically: they'd have to purposefully install a keylogger rather than just "sudo; ls /home/lucb1e") so I can jot down thoughts or save passwords in Thunderbird without worrying. In a more common scenario (not shared systems that are regularly wiped), you'd leave out the mounting of the homedir and copy essential files instead, such as your bashrc/vimrc. Using a simple shell script is something I still recommend to manage setting up personal systems. It's what you would do anyway, except stored in a file instead of typing the commands manually. So that's what I still use today, though I don't switch systems often enough to warrant maintaining commands for GUI configuration preferences (which can be a pain to figure out how to set from the command line). My current setup script is included in my bashrc (which I copy together with a .vimrc) and mainly pulls packages. I specify which categories I want, e.g. if the system has WiFi it'll install wavemon, or if the system has a GUI it'll install wireshark and xdotool.