Automatize Linux Installations

Ansible playbook that automates setting up a Linux machine for development and daily use. One command installs packages, sets up your shell, and applies your dotfiles across three machine profiles.

Supports Debian/Ubuntu-based and Arch-based distributions. The native package manager (APT or pacman) is selected automatically at runtime.

On top of the native package manager, this script uses 2 more package managers:

• Brew
• Flatpak

Usage

./install <tag>

Valid tags: home, work or wsl.

The script must be run as a regular user (it will refuse to run as root or with sudo). If Ansible is missing, it installs it first (from the official PPA on Debian-based systems, or via pacman on Arch), then runs ansible-playbook ansible.yml --ask-become-pass --tags <tag> and asks for your sudo password when needed.

Supported distributions

Family	Detection	Notes
Debian/Ubuntu	/etc/os-release contains debian or ubuntu	Full support, including the wsl profile
Arch-based (Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, ...)	/etc/os-release contains arch	wsl profile not supported; Homebrew is officially unsupported on Arch but works

Anything else fails fast with a clear error before installing Ansible.

On Arch, everything available in the official repositories is installed natively with pacman — Homebrew and Flatpak are only used for software that doesn't exist there (workmux, asdf, Brave, Bruno, Gearlever and Bottles).

Profiles

Tag	Purpose
home	Full desktop setup, including gaming (Wine) and personal apps
work	Desktop setup without gaming or personal apps
wsl	Minimal CLI-only setup for WSL (native packages, Homebrew, fish shell and dotfiles). Debian-based only.

What gets installed

Base (all profiles)

• Native packages (APT or pacman): tmux, curl, wget, stow, cmake, gcc, fzf, zsh, imagemagick, ffmpeg, etc.
• Homebrew: podman, podman-compose, neovim, starship, ripgrep, yt-dlp, fd, asdf, fish, opencode, workmux
  • On Arch these come from pacman instead, except workmux and asdf which have no native package and stay on Homebrew
• fish set as default login shell (from Homebrew on Debian-based systems; pacman's /usr/bin/fish on Arch)
• TPM (tmux plugin manager)
• CascadiaMono Nerd Font into ~/.fonts
• Dotfiles cloned from Tauromachian/dotfiles and applied with GNU Stow

Desktop only (home, work)

• Native extras: gpick, gparted, samba, fastfetch, virt-manager/QEMU virtualization stack, Japanese input (fcitx5-mozc + Noto CJK fonts)
• Flatpak: VLC, OBS Studio, Shotcut, Calibre, Brave, Bruno, Thunderbird, Gearlever, GIMP
  • On Arch, VLC, OBS Studio, Shotcut, Calibre, Thunderbird and GIMP are installed natively via pacman instead
• Ghostty terminal (deb repository on Debian-based systems; official extra package on Arch)
• NVIDIA drivers auto-installed if the hardware is detected (ubuntu-drivers on Ubuntu; nvidia-open-dkms on Arch)
• auto-cpufreq cloned (installer step currently disabled)
• Cinnamon desktop: keybindings loaded via dconf plus the auto-dark-light applet installed and enabled

Home only

• Wine (WineHQ stable with i386 enabled on Debian-based systems; multilib wine/wine-mono/wine-gecko on Arch)
• Steam, Telegram, Discord and Bottles (Flatpak on Debian-based systems; Telegram, Discord and Steam natively via pacman on Arch, Bottles stays Flatpak)
• Flatpak overrides giving Brave, Telegram and Discord access to $HOME

Project layout

install        # Bootstrap script: detects the distro, validates the tag, installs Ansible, runs the playbook
ansible.yml    # Three plays, tagged home / work / wsl; each play explicitly lists the task files it uses
tasks/*.yml    # One file per concern; files shared across plays contain no inner tags, so selection
               # is decided purely by which play imports them
vars/*.yml     # Per-family native package name mappings (debian.yml, archlinux.yml)

Profile-specific behavior lives in dedicated files (packages-wsl.yml, wine.yml, flatpak-home.yml) that only the matching play imports — tags select a play and nothing else.