A few months ago I got an old Thinkpad up and running again to use on my commute. It's got a pretty tiny SSD on it so to save on disk space I decided I'd install a distro that leans into system-wide packages instead of containers.
I've been very careful to only install things from system repositories (with a few minor exceptions for things I've installed from source).
A few months later and things are going great. I spend much less time fucking around trying to make things work. It's blissful.