My approach might be an outlier, but I’ll share since it’s a bit more platform agnostic.

I do almost all of it work in the terminal, so I had already been using chezmoi to manage my dotfiles for a few years. Eventually I added an Ansible bootstrapping playbook that runs whenever I setup a new environment to install and configure whatever I like.

I’m already living & breathing Ansible most days so it wasn’t a heavy lift, but it’s a pretty flexible approach that doesn’t bind me to any specific type of package manager or distro.