I’m doing a bunch of AI stuff that needs compiling to try various unrelated apps. I’m making a mess of config files and extras. I’ve been using distrobox and conda. How could I do this better? Chroot? Different user logins for extra home directories? Groups? Most of the packages need access to CUDA and localhost. I would like to keep them out of my main home directory.
Nix
NixOS containers could do what OP’s asking for, but it’ll be trickier with just nix (on other distro). It’ll handle build dependencies and such, but you’ll still need to keep your home or other directories clean some other way.
OP could use flakes to create these dev environments and clean them up without a trace once done.
Any files created by programs running in the dev environments will remain.
nix-collect-garbage
Does NOT delete any files that were written to, for example,
~/.localby anything ran in the dev shell.