I recently decided to tackle this exact problem, and ended up using Salt in masterless mode to do this. I have the most experience with Salt, and follow a few b

I recently decided to tackle this exact problem, and ended up using Salt in masterless mode to do this. I have the most experience with Salt, and follow a few best practices to ensure my states are idempotent. Here's my local laptop configuration with a one-step run (I only use Ubuntu laptops as o 2019): https://github.com/AkshatM/configuration https://github.com/AkshatM/configuration Some challenges and partial solutions I'm still figuring out: 1. Distribution. I cannot simply clone and run onto a new laptop as that assumes I have Git as well as my Git SSH keys for my user integrated - this is usually not the case for fresh laptops. Instead, I carry a clone of this repo in a USB stick, and run `launch.sh` as root. 2. Configuring workspaces. Golang is particularly annoying because $GOPATH != my existing workspace folder (which has many cross-language products in it), so I need to declare two separate workspaces. :/ I would like to one day have a single unified workspace. 3. Version management. I've discovered doing this yourself is detrimental to your sanity (and that apt's package pinning is some of the worst I've ever seen), so I now only require pyenv, nvm, tfswitch, etc. for doing this for languages and favor the latest secure versions of all apt-packages. 4. Deciding which package manager to use. I recently discovered snap, which offers an improved experience for Linux applications compared to apt, but suffers from a small ecosystem. I'm using snap where possible for all my favourite apps, but by and large apt is still the ulcer of my life.