GNU Stow alternative: Dotfiles Pro

GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager: you keep your dotfiles in a repository organized into "packages," and Stow symlinks them into $HOME. It's elegant and dependency-light, but it does exactly one thing, link files. Dotfiles Pro does that job too (link, copy, or template per file) and manages the whole machine: packages, system configuration, repositories, and key-level settings.

GNU Stow vs Dotfiles Pro

• Mechanism: Stow is a symlink farm, and the dotfiles role links too by default, but each file can also be copied or templated.
• Settings: roles manage the configs they know at the key level instead of as whole files.
• Templating: Stow has none, so a file is identical on every machine, while Dotfiles Pro renders per-machine config from your vars with Jinja.
• Machine state: no packages, services, or repositories in Stow, while Dotfiles Pro handles all three in the same run.
• Drift: re-running Stow re-links, and that's the whole of it; Dotfiles Pro applies the whole machine back to its declared state.

When GNU Stow is the better choice

• You want the simplest possible, near-zero-dependency approach.
• Your dotfiles are identical across machines (no templating needed).
• You don't need packages or system state managed.

When to choose Dotfiles Pro

• You're tired of a symlink farm plus a setup.sh for "everything else."
• Packages, services, and repositories should be managed alongside the files.
• Your several machines run from one config repo, and a team can share a baseline collection on top.

Migrating from GNU Stow

Point the dotfiles role at your repo and list each package's files in dotfiles_list; it links them the way stow did, folded into the apply, with backup and pruning. Then promote the configs a role manages (git identity, shell aliases) to settings. The migration guide walks it package by package.

See the full alternatives comparison for the scored tables.