The immutable state of distros like fedora silerblue and opensuse microos leads to the use of distrobox.
I defaulted to a fedora image but there must be better images for the job. What do you suggest to use if you just want to install pdflatex, pandoc, R, julia, python, ffmpeg, etc. Just the usual tools you need for the tasks everyday
One year ago I treated how long it takes to get Gimp to install on various distros in distrobox:
Results:
But that’s just installation speed. It simply shows that there are quite big differences depending on use case.