> don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need

I thought about using any one of those tools but happily chose shell scripts and symlinks instead. It hasn't let me down in almost a decade with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice and would highly recommend this approach.

It's basically a 2,500 line shell script to fully automate setting up a system from scratch in a general purpose / opinionated but customizable way that works on Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, macOS and supports WSL 2 in Windows. I have it running on multiple systems, no need to even fork it since it uses patterns suitable for making changes in git ignored files and also has a config file for certain things.

When it comes to setting up a complete desktop environment or even just terminal based tools, dotfiles IMO are more than config files. There's install scripts, packages, system level configs, running commands, OS specific differences and more. It's really nice to be able to run 1 command and have a fresh system ready to go in about 10 minutes.

Shell script is probably my favorite language at this point.