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
For everyday tasks, I think a Fedora distrobox works fine, but you would have to upgrade it eventually and I admit I’m not sure how you do that under distrobox. Still, I initially used it and still have a Fedora distrobox I use for doing stuff for my job, as well as one I use for running a game modding program that requires Java, and they both work fine.
I’ve also had success with a Debian distrobox, which I used to compile Render96ex. Debian is pretty universal, so it’s much easier to follow compile instructions using it than a Fedora distrobox ^^’