On 17Dec2021 10:26, linux guy <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There are a few aspects to this: - installed packages - personal files - dev files I used to maintain a small fleet of RedHat servers, and had a couple of scripts for package comparison: https://hg.sr.ht/~cameron-simpson/css/browse/bin/yum-missing https://hg.sr.ht/~cameron-simpson/css/browse/bin/rpm-comparehost You moight need to replace the command "yum" with "dnf" these days, but they should help. In particular rpm-comparehost has a --yum option to install missing packages. Personal files: I have a script "putacc" I use to drop my primary persoanl stuff onto other machines - this is config files and related stuff. It assumes you have a "primary" - for me this is my laptop. But given that, I routinely go "putacc host1 host2 host3 ..." after I've updated something. It uses ssh and rsync, so "host1" etc is just an ssh Host clause name. For example, if I record new account credentials in my GPG-encrypted key store, I go "putacc home borg" to put it on the home and local servers. putacc/synacc run from a core list of files (an "rsync --files-from" file) and a per-host list - the key store is only present in the home and borg per-host lists, not the other hosts. SO there's a limited degree of customisation available. I've been doing this for years. Dev files: Mercurial or Git repos. Then you've only got to go "hg fetch" or "git pull" in a work area before continuing and the updates from upstream will be pulled in. Finally, there's a bunch of pretend shared filesystem things you can use: 1: Things like Dropbox or SyncThing will sync folders between machines. Sometimes a little clunky. 2: sshfs: I keep a few things from the home server mounted on the laptop using sshfs. The files are not local, but I can cd in there and do things, and the changes apply to where they're stored. If you're remote with poor internet cding etc and editing text files works quite well still, doing things with large files will be infeasible due to bandwidth. If you've got a VPN you can use NFS and SMB/CIFS too. Sshfs is more flexible, though a clunkier approach in theory. 3: backups: I've got arun-backups script to back up specific stuff from a host to wherever. A combination of image backups (plain rsync onto the backup image) and histbackup (rsync with history). Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt;

On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 2:32 PM Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt; wrote: Thanks for the reply. I took a closer look at the use cases on my laptop and my workstation and decided against keeping them sync'd. While it is a headache to have them unsync'd and have to manually transfer files and individually install things, the use cases are just different enough that it doesn't work to keep them entirely sync'd. At this point in time, anyway. Should I revisit the need to keep 2 computer sync'd, I'll refer to the advice in your post.