Usually, I prefer manually installing the packages needed for getting started with a new language or technlogy.
I avoid using distro package managers since they tend to be a bit outdated in this regard, and specialised package managers like SDKMAN! seem overkill for one or more packages. Exceptions being languages with excellent tooling and version management like Rust or Ocaml.
I've been doing this for a while and was wondering what the general consensus is
Edit: Thanks for your replies everyone! I've decided to stick with my distro package manager.
Definitely stick to the OS package manager. Not doing this is a mistake a lot of devs make.
Otherwise you end up with an app that doesn't run on most systems, and expecting people to do curl piped to bash as root.
Stick to the stable branch. Stick to the OS repos.
I run Ubuntu and use the Nala frontend for APT to keep a log of my package installs. That way, I can easily remove everything if I no longer need to work with a particular language or set of dependencies. For anything too complicated, I like to drop into a Docker container (which integrates nice with VSCode/Codium)
+1 to running whatever is packaged by your distro. For me, Fedora is rarely out of date. If worse comes to worse, you can always volunteer to become a packager and improve the ecosystem for everyone while fixing your own problems.
