Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out

Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category. How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install. If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history. [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu