# GNU Stow

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-stow/

12 people recommended GNU Stow in Hacker News comments, 2 had mixed feelings and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 12 months, in 8 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for managing dotfiles and /usr/local installs as symlinks. Main caveat: handling machine-specific changes is awkward.

Summary written by Claude from 16 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Dotfiles management via symlink farms (3 comments in the sample): "makes provisioning a new machine with my configs and other such files much easier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170792)) "Have you considered using a dotfiles management solution like gnu stow?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46687586)) "If what you want is an orchestrated symlink farm, here's your dude." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742739))
- Manages /usr/local installs (2 comments in the sample): "I use GNU stow as a parallel package manager within /usr/local that plays nice with the rest of the OS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48102673)) "stow is an indispensable tool for me to manage /usr/local for manually installed software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589299))

## What people warn about

- Symlinks caused problems for some (2 comments in the sample): "symlinks would cause any issues. They did." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593908)) "I had similar problems with GNU Stow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589177))
- Not flexible enough for some (2 comments in the sample): "realised that I was actually not happy with it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591666)) "after finding Stow not flexible enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607411))

## Other dotfile managers people recommend

- [Home Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/home-manager/): 28 recommend, 2 mixed, 13 criticize
- [chezmoi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chezmoi/): 16 recommend, 3 mixed, 6 criticize
- [Nix with Home Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nix-with-home-manager/): 5 recommend, 1 mixed, 0 criticize

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "GNU Stow", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-stow/ (12 recommend, 2 mixed, 5 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.