Use OS-agnostic package manager for binaries

[MrPickles]

Something like Nix or Homebrew.

• Having random if statements littered throughout the installation script looks ugly.
• This allows me to install stow, which will also clean out a lot of the installation script.
• I'll know for sure which packages are available. (E.g. some packages aren't available or are outdated in apt.)

[MrPickles]

https://www.chezmoi.io/ seem interesting

[MrPickles]

While stow is nice and simple, its development velocity seems terribly slow. Installing homebrew requires sudo access, which makes it also a prerequisite for having stow.

[MrPickles]

Chezmoi doesn't require root, and it has pretty good support for features beyond simple files (e.g. maintaining custom OMZ plugins). Technically, the "optimal" way to structure this is to use chezmoi to manage dotfiles and have a bootstrap script manage nix (though nix will require root).

[MrPickles]

My one gripe with Chezmoi is that there's a lot of magic.

Both nix and homebrew require root, so it's a wash.

[MrPickles]

Lack of root shouldn't be a problem, as long as we're able to fail gracefully and continue on with the setup without issue. This pretty much rules out stow as a viable option.