The last-millennium solution to me-only installs is to put stuff in $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib, and $HOME/etc, and put those in the appropriate paths. Build the package with e.g. CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME. At some point I switched to putting those dirs all in $HOME/opt for tidiness.

It's worked for me since workstations were shaped like pizza boxes.

I'm sure there are some things it can't do, but it goes a long way. When you're installing distributed binary packages you have less ability to control the baked-in install dirs, but if the package honors the conventional $(env) it can work.

I had this exact situation with Citrix workspace refusing to install after my upgrading to the latest Fedora. I had to force install and things did work but I would have preferred to not having to do that. I don't know enough about Homebrew to know if it would have helped (Citrix distributes .deb and .rpm files).

Honestly for python just using uv is enough, not only does it handle virtualenv for you, it will also install the necessary python version you need locally.