GNU Stow turned me into the ultimate Linux distro-hopper

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Distro-hopping is not for the faint of heart, but for a number of Linux users, it’s practically a sport. Not two single Linux distros are equal, and each provides its own advantages, so it’s not hard to get into the habit once you’ve learned how to do it.

If you want to get into it, GNU Stow is a nice tool to keep in your arsenal.

What’s GNU Stow?

A distro hopper’s favorite tool

GNU Stow is a powerful, lightweight symlink farm manager that has become a staple utility within the Linux and Unix communities. Originally developed in the 1990s, its primary purpose was to manage the installation of software packages compiled from source code.

Before the widespread adoption of modern package managers like APT or Pacman, administrators would install programs into a centralized directory, typically located at /usr/local/stow, and use Stow to generate symbolic links from that location into the standard executable paths like /usr/local/bin. This methodology prevented file conflicts and allowed for the clean uninstallation of software simply by removing the symlinks and deleting the isolated package directory.

Over the years, though, the Linux community repurposed this utility to solve an entirely different problem: managing user configuration files, colloquially known as dotfiles. Modern applications and command-line tools store their user-specific settings in hidden files and directories within the home folder.

As users customize their environments, keeping track of these scattered files becomes increasingly difficult. GNU Stow takes a stab at solving this by allowing users to move all…

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