In enterprise environments, some old school distros have an archiving layer that sits between hosts and their normal repos that you can use to hold back updates. Maybe you could use something like that. I forget what Red Hat's offering is called but I think it's part of Satellite. Idk if there are any free tools for that, but maybe there are.
The other alternative escape hatched that NixOS has, like FHSUserEnvs or just steam-run, you likely already know about.
I'm no expert, but I believe the purpose of containers is to include all user space dependencies... so this doesn't make sense to me.
I personally am surprised NixOS hasn't leaned into marketing itself as ideal for creating reproducible containers.
Or maybe you're working in an organization where some instructions are written for another distro, and you just want to be able to follow them word for word the first time you attempt a task, to make sure you understand the process on a 'normal' distro, or because you're troubleshooting with someone who is running another distro. Then NixOS' support for running containers is handy, but afterward you're left running some containers whose reproducibility doesn't match what you've come to expect frok the rest of your system.
> I personally am surprised NixOS hasn't leaned into marketing itself as ideal for creating reproducible containers.
Agreed, I think this is a really good use case for a lot of companies.