GNU Stow
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
4recommend
3warn against
Mar 29, 2026first mention
Jun 20, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“check out gnu stow for this! i place my config files in ~/dots, mirroring the structure as if it were my home directory, and gnu stow can symlink everything”
“I switched to stow”
switched from custom install processon “Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi”
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“I have stow too in my micro DE, use it across a few machines and it's holding up really well.”
Caveats and dissent
“after finding Stow not flexible enough”
“I then used stow for about a year just to see whether symlinks would cause any issues. They did.”
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“realised that I was actually not happy with it”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
Data: gnu-stow.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 11
“after finding Stow not flexible enough”
“check out gnu stow for this! i place my config files in ~/dots, mirroring the structure as if it were my home directory, and gnu stow can symlink everything”
“I then used stow for about a year just to see whether symlinks would cause any issues. They did.”
“I switched to stow”
“I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years”
“I have stow too in my micro DE, use it across a few machines and it's holding up really well.”
“realised that I was actually not happy with it”
“stow to manually update symlinks when I add a new dotfile”
“I used stow for a long time”
“The stow approach is something that I considered but ultimately rejected”
“use gnu `stow` and `make` to build them”