[aequitas]

With Docker at least everything is contained in the container. Which makes isolating and resetting environments a breeze. Something I worry about often is contaminating my system's 'state'. Which always leads to broken builds or incomplete build systems because a missing dependency is not spotted on your system because it was installed by some other tool some other time.

I tend to write my Makefiles to create as much of a local dev environment as possible for every project. Using Python virtualenv/Pipenv/Poetry, Ruby vendored dirs, custom Gopath per project (using direnv), etc. Most tools support some sort of isolation/localisation, but it's often just not on by default.

[jrumbut]

I wish more tools did this, I almost always want a local, self-contained environment for everything. The few times I don't actively want I don't see much pain in having one. A couple minutes setup time, maybe?

I have seriously considered hiring someone to audit and prune all the random little libraries and tools I've installed over the years for that one-off time I had to process a weird file format or wanted to try something from HN.

[pknopf]

To keep my system clean, I use Darch.

https://godarch.com/

Every boot is a fresh install. Any one-off only becomes persisted unless I add it to my recipes.

https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes

[alephu5]

Maybe you'd like NixOS?

[jrumbut]

I'm fascinated by NixOS and am following it, just haven't had a lot of time to dive in yet.

It does sound like the right idea. This is hypocritical as someone who doesn't use it but I hope more people use it.