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I avoid using distro package managers since they tend to be a bit outdated in this regard, and specialised package managers like SDKMAN!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
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.
Thanks for the advice :)