+1 for chezmoi

It makes syncing my dotfiles between my different systems fairly painless. It just works.

It's so difficult to compete with free though. The monthly fee for kagi is a bit steep, which is not for everyone (>5 €/month), even if that is the 'true' price of searching the web. It does have some very interesting features though. A colleague of mine is always praising it, saying that the search results are better than anything else he has tried.

I started using qwant last year for the same reason and I haven't looked back. Search results are excellent. I sometimes switch to Startpage as a proxy for google.

Gnome on my desktop and laptop. I use xfce when working in a vm, because it's a bit lighter (I usually just need a terminal + text editor). I prefer gnome for regular use.