Might be worth looking into immutable distros (nix, guix) and their home management systems, or containerised apps (flatpak, where you can inject config). A lot of tools are hardcoded to non standard locations so it’s kind of a losing battle by default. A similar strategy would be to use permissions or mount certain folders as read only.

Yay more options

Wow, was pretty heavily bombarded by domains ads just a few weeks ago!

Mostly remember looking at the printer in a game shop thinking I’ll never afford this. Very cool result.