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
What’s nice is that for new fresh installs, non-free-firmware repo is already enabled if the installer detects that it’s needed, way more convenient than before.
Contrib and non-free still need to be enabled manually though, it’d be nice if they added toggles for those in the installer itself one day