Using the Nix package manager solves these problems. With nix, all sorts of niche packages are available, so installing just isn't difficult. (& packages nix i

Using the Nix package manager solves these problems. With nix, all sorts of niche packages are available, so installing just isn't difficult. (& packages nix installed only go in /nix/store, so the filesystem isn't messed up). If you want the same programs (the same version of programs, even) across different Linux distributions, and macOS, nix is the best tool for that. If you're worried about your environment being an unreproducible snowflake, nix's main advertised feature is reproducing package installation. Although, yeah, Nix suffer the same cost of "1 more niche thing to install".