I thought I'd be able to solve this with a NixOS config, the thinking being that my machine config is a git repo, and if/when a laptop breaks I can simply duplicate it on the new machine.
What's actually happening is that I'm spending more time wrestling unsaved passwords across windows, iPhone, and new Linux installs than any other computer activity.
Like most consumer users, I never really understood how iCloud worked, much less OneDrive, and more often than not am wrestling them to not do things automatically that confuse me. My current state is trying to setup syncthing across two windows machines, only to have an automatic OneDrive action create a mess of my desktop, and I'm hoping someone here will have a 3rd person view and help me stop wasting time on configuration.
My last local maxima was "iPhone / MacBook, everything just works even if iCloud is weird I can do dev work and generally my phone and laptop are the same". I'd like to be able to say "x phone and x laptop, everything just works and when something gets broken/lost I can magically restore the software setup on a new device to replace it without losing data as in files or data as in installed and configured software"
Can this even be done? Am I tilting at windmills? It seems like every major company is trying to achieve this under the condition that you have vendor lock in at the hardware, but even assuming you do that you will only achieve data protection as in files, and every new machine will need another new vsCode install/config step, as will every other application.
I get that there is and always will be both a hardware lifecycle and vendor lock-in, what I feel should be left in the past is the idea that software configuration cannot be moved across the hardware lifecycle painlessly.
