These days, besides the dotfiles and few minimal settings that I remember, I just let it go as I go along. In about a month or so, it all gets to where I want.

This is what I tend towards too. It helps that my setup isn’t too deeply customized (for example I think the only UserDefaults change I make is to add a Quit menu item to the Finder’s app menu), so even defaults are reasonably usable.

That's fine yeah but sometimes you want a truly clean setup. Basically using it as an excuse to get rid of stuff you don't need.

Even with that, there’s more than enough tools out there to automate setup.

For example, I use https://www.chezmoi.io/ which creates a standard home directory set up (prompt etc), decrypts SSH keys and other private stuff, and installs a bunch of tooling through brew/apt.

That makes sense but that makes it a personal choice to then go through setting the whole thing up from scratch.

A “clean setup” is so overemphasized. It has no advantage other than wasting your own time.

Different people lose energy from different tasks. I.e. it may not tax your mind to have clutter around, but it can be a distraction for someone else. For some people (like me), clutter is fine but starting on a task takes a lot of energy. The important thing is knowing and accommodating for yourself to get the best results.

But you could just remove things from your existing install rather than starting all over. It really isn’t about clutter.

The “clean install” thing is a habit from when old Windows would have phantom issues if you didn’t start over every so often.

There are many tools I wish I had never installed. I’m now installing them on a VM first

You can also set most of these options in a shell script, here is my (shitty and outdated, but it proves the point) script https://github.com/pprotas/dotfiles/blob/main/osconfig.sh

Just run the shellscript when you get a new macos device

Unfortunately some macs may be within a corporate environment and thus are unable to use an external drive, so no Time Machine.

My work MacBooks have the migration assistant disabled by MDM, it's a pain in the ass to swap, I can live with them for 3-4 years though so not a big problem, just annoying.

For my personal Macs the migration assistant is fantastic, never had a hiccup and when I boot the new machine after migration is almost exactly like the old one, except for having to re-authorise some music software.

If you upgrade from Intel to Apple Silicon skip apps sync. Too many issues.

First I’ve heard anyone say this. FWIW, I experienced no issues, and I’ve been using migration assistant since my first (well, second, I suppose) Mac (I recently found an old config file dated 2007!).

I went from 2017 Intel to 2024 M3 Max

I had problems with Homebrew and some apps installed through it (crashing). I couldn't compile one DLL. I had to reinstall Command line tools. Deleted one electron app - couldn't be bother.

I also noticed two binaries (one was Python) running in x86 mode via Rosetta. It was slow. Another reinstall. You can check Kind in Activity Monitor (apple/intel)