Power User Linux Setup (PULSE)

An opinionated, reproducible workstation setup for Ubuntu 24.04: one setup.toml manifest and a set of invoke tasks that take a fresh install to a fully configured dev/desktop environment in one run — shell (zsh, Oh My Zsh, Powerlevel10k), languages and CLIs (Python/uv, Go, Rust, Node, kubectl, gcloud, ...), GNOME, fonts, terminal config, and more, all declared in one place and safe to re-run.

Along with source control, this is meant to minimize the impact of hardware failure and to make it easy to reproduce your setup on a new machine, with the least amount of manual reconfiguration.

Use cases

• Full workstation — bare-metal or VM Ubuntu 24.04 desktop, GNOME included.
• Headless / server — PULSE_EXCLUDE_TAGS skips anything needing a display or hardware access.
• Dev container — the same manifest builds a Dockerfile-based dev image.
• WSL2 — a diagnostic task (inv wsl.check) and a one-shot install task (inv wsl.install) with a documented tag profile for Windows/WSL2.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 24.04 (bare metal, WSL2, or a container base image)
• sudo access
• git, curl, bash — present on any stock Ubuntu install

Everything else — uv, Python, invoke — is installed by bootstrap.sh itself. The intent is to be distribution-agnostic eventually, but only Ubuntu 24.04 (noble numbat) is tested today.

Quick start

cd ~
mkdir -p projects
cd projects
git clone https://github.com/TheodoreAD/power-user-linux-setup.git
cd power-user-linux-setup
./bootstrap.sh        # installs uv + invoke
inv setup             # runs the full setup

Recommended hardware

Not a requirement — just a sizing guideline for what this setup assumes you're comfortable running:

Tier	Spec
Minimum	8GB RAM, 1× 27" FHD display
Regular	16GB RAM, 2× 27" FHD displays
Power user	32GB RAM, 1× 42"+ 4K UHD display

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This is just a short overview. For everything else — use-case walkthroughs, the full package catalog, how the config system and tags work, and per-topic reference docs (shell, languages, Docker/Kubernetes, GNOME, WSL, troubleshooting, ...) — see the docs site:

theodoread.github.io/power-user-linux-setup

Working on this repo itself, rather than just using it? See CONTRIBUTING.md.