Stow vs Home Manager: Managing Dotfiles on NixOS (and Beyond)
I’ve used GNU Stow to manage dotfiles for a while. It’s simple, elegant, and gets out of your way. You organise configs into directories, run stow */, and symlinks appear in $HOME. Done. But once I committed to NixOS as my daily driver, Stow started feeling like the wrong tool for the job — an imperative shim bolted onto a system designed to never need one. This post covers what changed, why Home Manager replaced Stow in my workflow, and when Stow is still the better choice. ...