Besides many nix computers I also have wife, dog, children, chores, shopping to be done. Unlike when I was young engineer I could stay all night fiddling with bash scripts and environments.

What does your wife, dog, children, chores, and shopping have to do with custom configuration and scripts? Just set up a Git repo online, put your files there, and take a couple of minutes to improve it incrementally when you encounter inconveniences. And just like that, you made your life easier for a marginal effort.

They compete for time.

Don't even try to explain the scripts to wife*, try the dog. At least he'll understand it just as much and be enthusiastic to hear it!

*may not be applicable to all wives, ymmv.

I thought my wife latex, she loves me for it :D

I'm saying that makes no sense, as I've wrote in the comment you're replying to.

Having a wife increases the opportunity costs of the time you spend on maintaining the scripts and also increases the costs while writing these (when the wife is nagging).

For anyone else reading this comment who was confused because this seems like the opposite of what you'd expect about Nix: Hacker News ate the asterisks and turned them into italics.

use a backslash. \*

(had to use a double backslash to render that correctly)

Or two consecutive asterisks: ** becomes *

I don't get why this is a problem. Just stick all your configs in a git repo and clone it wherever you need it.

I run two OSes. So two variants.

Some are desktops, some laptops, some servers. Different packages installed, different hardware. Three more variants.

Yes, I do have a script to set up my environment, but it already has a lot of conditional behavior to handle these five total variants. And I don't want to have to re-test the scripts and re-sync often.