Ask HN: How do you sync or migrate KDE settings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you sync or migrate KDE settings?

4 pointsembeng40964 comments

Inspired by today's post on Ubuntu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49908757

I use KDE at home, and installed (K)ubuntu on a separate laptop to use for work stuff (Yocto). It's a bit tedious to have to go into system settings and click through menus to configure e.g. middle-click settings, alt-tab settings, sleep/wake/lock behavior, Dolphin toolbar/views, etc, every time I set up a machine.

Some options I've seen: Konsave (https://github.com/Prayag2/konsave); KDE Migrant (https://github.com/nekromoff/kde-migrant); a guide to writing your own kwriteconfig scripts in Plasma 5 (https://tylerkontra.com/posts/programmatic-kde-customization/).

For NixOS users there's plasma-manager (https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager) but obviously can't use that on e.g. Kubuntu.

I haven't looked too much into dotfile management (e.g. GNU Stow or Chezmoi) but maybe they are options as well?

Just looking to get ideas and suggestions from the HN crowd.

I don't have solutions for you; i want to also keep my KDE settings saved. But I'm full on nixos and home manager so I'm going plasma manager route.

Technically you could use plasma-manager on any distro; you install nix, and use home-manager standalone. I think with KDE; you would want to skip package management, but doable; I used to do with arch.

I guess depends on what you already use for configuration management. Bear in mind; a lot of KDE apps do store state information (window size etc.) inside the config directory and there wasn't an easy way to disentangle config from state when I used to manage my config with a git repo.

Nice, I didn't know nix could be used on any distro; I only knew about it from my friend who's a nixos enthusiast.

Few links I found, for anyone else encountering this for the first time:

https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2024-07-24_dont-use-nixos/

https://tech.aufomm.com/my-nix-journey-use-nix-with-ubuntu/

https://jeancharles.quillet.org/posts/2023-02-07-The-home-ma...

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/16tdugd/nix_without_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1lbv8hn/ive_avoided_...

The concept is severely overloaded;

- nix primarily is the package manager; basically can be installed anywhere. The big thing is; it builds packages to /nix/ , keeps software there and all the dependencies are done through symlinks to packages in the nix store - nix is also the functional programming language that the nix package manager can take as input - nixos is a framework for writing a system configuration in the nix language; and produces a working linux distribution; integrated with nix. - home-manager is copying the nixos framework, but brings it to userspace management.

The biggest issue getting into home-manager from outside is; it's high learning curve and due to being in the nix ecosystem; there is a lot of concepts that it uses (modules, configuration in functional paradigm) that is a whole lot to learn from 0 just to manage system config, but once things click together, it is wonderful.

To add to what you have found; there is also https://github.com/numtide/system-manager which brings NixOS' declarative system configuration to other distros as well, but I haven't personally used it.

Awesome, nix + home-manager or system-manager might be the solution I'm looking for, thank you!

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