system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Best way to install multiple programming tools while keeping everything "clean"?

I just got a new laptop and in my previous one I found myself many times full on garbage files of different frameworks or programming languages and sometimes I had issues when trying out some new tool because the other things that I had installed were getting in the way, what is your alternative to keep your PC clean while working with multiple technologies?

An idea I've been looking into was making virtual machines for different technologies, but maybe there are other solutions.
gpt
Creating separate VMs for each language or framework sounds like overkill to me.

A lot of this comes down to using the right packaging tools. For instance, npm in Javascript; Maven/Gradle in Java; pip+virtualenv in Python; "go get" and vendoring in Go. The idea is to keep all of your dependencies scoped to the specific project that uses them. 

Your project directory (and your version control repository) should contain all the information needed to build the project, without requiring anything to be installed system-wide except for the language and runtime environment itself. If you decide to uninstall a language that you're not using, you can just reinstall it later and you won't have lost anything important.