[themckman]

I sort of "version" or segregate my $HOME directory into a separate Workspaces directory in my real home for which I then have a script to activate a particular work space. For the most part, this script just sets $HOME and execs a new /bin/bash. This works pretty well. Most everything respects the new $HOME and works from there (so far only SSH and Java seem to ignore this to which I think I could fix Java by setting $JAVA_OPTS and explicitly setting the user.home property). On OS X I can install a separate copy of homebrew for each work space and have only the packages in each work space that I need or want. I was really looking forward to doing the same thing with Nix when I recently switched to Linux at my new job, but was very disappointed to find out that it really wanted to be installed somewhere in the root file system. Thanks for the link, I hadn't come across that one yet. I might give that a try.