Huge thanks to everyone for the advice! One MacBook and one PC down, one more MacBook to go. And thanks to y'all the Windows install is the least bloated one I've had in a long time — phew.

Love the smell of a fresh install in the morning

@robin Well, this only applies if the Macbooks are either new (as in 'just out of the box) or they're yours from the get-go, but I'd be sure the Macs are untied to the previous user's icloud/applestore/etc accounts. It has to do with being able to use findmymac (and some other functionality since they're tied to the serial number of the actual computer). Then again, you might already know this (and I could be wrong about a detail or two).

@robin on macOS, I bootstrap homebrew and uv, run `uvx dotlink <url>` to pull down and symlink my dotfiles, and then use `brew bundle` to install all the packages/apps I care about in one shot:

https://pypi.org/project/dotlink/

https://github.com/amyreese/dotfiles

On Windows, I used a tool to build a stripped-down installer that lets me have a much nicer out-of-box experience with far less crap pre-installed/enabled. But I treat my PC like a gaming console, so 99% from there is installing Steam+games. 😅

@robin @vmbrasseur The first thing I do with a new Mac is to reformat it as case-sensitive (personal quirk) and change the name of the disk to something machine-identifying, Then install the latest patch level of the current [~1] macOS. So, Sequoia.
Past that, I use the Apple Migration Assistant, so I have not built a new world of tools from scratch in about a decade. And mine is very idiosyncratic.

( I’m not a useful source of any Windows ideas)

@robin For the Windows rig, a few folks mentioned Ninite to make installing apps a bit less painful. I use and recommend Chocolatey [1] instead.

It's all command line, but easy, e.g.:
choco install powertoys
choco install notepadplusplus

You can install and manage almost all the programs you need using chocolatey.

Also, I consider Open-Shell [2] (choco install open-shell) an essential upgrade to the unusable Windows 11 Start Menu.

[1] https://chocolatey.org/
[2] https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

@robin I'm a NextCloud user (self-hosted) so one of the first things I do is add my NextCloud account (and clients) so I can start syncing everything over. When I tried out daily driving a Mac some time ago, this made it much easier to switch to MacOS, and later on, switch back to Linux.

@robin my most used resource when reinstalling Windows is https://duckduckgo.com/?q=install+windows+11+without+ms+account

@robin that I have the latest version of my preferred Linux (currently KDE Neon) on my USB key.

@robin Install a non-evil browser, and then my password manager. On gaming, install Steam. On Mac, install XCode and then Homebrew and then Nova and then start downloading repos.

@robin installing #asahi ?