This is a great answer thanks. I always install the environments through apt or synaptics. Then one of my issues or maybe its normal, all the packages and apps comingle I feel thats where the problem lays. I want each environment to be separate and actually be their perspective environment instead of each being a mish mash of each other. Hope that makes sense. It always causes issues for me at least. Also tried separated accounts for each environment and I’m sure thats a good way, but it didn’t work probably do to permissions. Idk how to set the right permissions to keep them seperste

Does synaptics or even apt take care of these things automatically during install or do you manually need to configure every app you download?

oh dude i never do backups each time i start over from scratch its a brand new version of linux. the only “important” files (that I know of), i sync to the cloud.