The Dotfiles Repository

The setup as engineering, a repository graded on whether a stranger can rebuild your desktop, not on how it looks

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 20%

Here the desktop is judged as software. Beauty earns nothing on this page; the beauty is marked under The Rice. What is marked here is whether the thing can be rebuilt.

The brief#

Deliver the repository that turns a bare machine into your desktop, and make it good enough that a stranger could.

The reason this is separate from The Rice is that the two virtues genuinely diverge. A stunning desktop that exists only as undocumented, hand-mutated config on one laptop fails here exactly as it should. A plain setup that clones cleanly and rebuilds itself without fuss scores well. Reproducibility is the actual discipline of the craft, and this component exists to reward it on its own.

What you submit#

A public git repository. It should bootstrap a fresh machine with as little manual intervention as you can manage, read clearly enough that a marker can find where any setting lives, carry a history that shows how the setup was built rather than a single dumped commit, and credit every source it grew from.

The criteria below are weighted. Reproducibility carries the most because it is the point.