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For takeaway 2, I've found using NixOS lately to be good at keeping myself disciplined about documenting the odd little hacks I've added to fix an issue. Like in this case, I'd have to add something to my boot.loader.grub.extraConfig setting, comment it and document it with a hopefully-useful commit message so that if I encounter something similar in future, I can at least look at those bits of documentation and hopefully connect the two.

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+1 on this. I use to consider those Linux evenings as a waste of time. But with every bit of NixOS tracked within git with some history and context, I now think of it like an investment for the next 50 years, which has way more chances to pay back

I don't use NixOS but I have a similar documenting approach to all my OS and $HOME config files. Every customized file / override is checked in to a git repo, and there's an `install.sh` that takes each such file / directory and copies / symlinks it from the repo to its target location. Basically the same concept as dotfiles, but also for system files. I've restored a couple of machines from OS reinstall to full readiness this way.

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