You wrote: > I'm aware of Guix, but that's probably an extreme example, most people probably aren't willing to sandbox literally their entire OS install, plus

You wrote: > I'm aware of Guix, but that's probably an extreme example, most people probably aren't willing to sandbox literally their entire OS install, plus it's entirely unreasonable to require a particular OS in order to handle dependencies of your project. It shouldn't matter what OS I'm using (within reason), the project should have an automated way to install any dependencies it requires. Guix is just a package manager, not an operating system. The Guix System Distribution, on the other hand, is a GNU system. You can use Guix on any GNU+Linux system; you do not need GuixSD for that.