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

4 points by embeng4096 14 days ago | 4 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.

silverbluep 14 days ago |

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.

embeng4096 14 days ago | |

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_...

silverbluep 14 days ago | | |

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.