If you want a mostly nice, mostly well-documented development toolchain, you can either: 1. Install some proprietary, GUI-based development tools and color ins

If you want a mostly nice, mostly well-documented development toolchain, you can either: 1. Install some proprietary, GUI-based development tools and color inside the lines, 2. Figure out what toolchain you want your students to use, and package it up using apt or docker or whatever (and tell your students to get a VM if they're on a different OS), or 3. Give your students remote logins on shared computers. Any of these will allow you to keep the "bullshittery" to a tolerable minimum, and get on with the subject of the course. But in the long run, unfortunately, if you want to be a programmer, you've got to learn to manage your own tools. This might mean being able to figure out command-line "bullshittery", or it may mean knowing how to unit test ASP.NET REST controllers. Even in the days of MacOS 8, back when there was no command line, there were still plenty of unholy, mind-eating horrors hiding in the dev stack. (The Component Manager, for instance.) And let's not even talk about the complexities of the web stack. You can choose your flavor of "bullshittery", but if you want to be halfway good at this job, you've eventually got learn how to deal with whatever tools you choose.