I've decided that unless you're ok with running a very restricted set of ancient applications, don't even try to use CentOS. I've seen multiple billion dollar companies who can't seen to avoid f'ing up the yum repos on CentOS.

I'm not able to go full docker on my machines @work, but I do have some statically linked tarballs. There is a reason apps that deploy in hostile environments (skype, chrome, firefox) bundle most of their dependencies.