Well, on my Fedora system, I have a simple setup. I run a development shell with system Ruby and the following in my .bashrc: export GEM_BIN=/home/user/Code/bin export GEM_PATH=/home/user/Code/.gem export GEM_HOME=/home/user/Code/.gem export PATH=/home/user/Code/bin:$PATH This used to work, I could execute both gem and bundler commands correctly. Now (sometime around Ruby 3.2 upgrade) things changed and I have to set the flags to the gem command (and for instance `--user-install` is handled by `gem install` but not `gem pristine` so I have to use even different flags). Yet again, with each new installation (or upgrade), I have to undertake to make things simply work. I may be able to work things out, even if Gem isn't my expertise, but should we expect for each new user to handle that?  Yes, I understand, a lot of developers use rvm, rbenv or a similar tool. I feel that rvm is too complicated for my usecase (I also got bitten in the past by some of the design choices they made). rbenv, last I checked, was mostly for macOS users. I am aware of asdf and I think this is the closest to what I would call a good manager. I also make a conscious decision to use what's provided by my distro (for example, I trust my distro to provide good binaries more than I trust a `curl | bash` script to do so). But again, while I would say installing gems to a home directory by default was a good choice Fedora made, I would disagree with an idea of distributions having to choose what to do. Sometimes I encounter a Debian server or workstation and then I have to be aware of the extra steps I have to make. All in all, this makes the behavior of `gem` and `bundler` go against a tenet of Ruby that it should "not surprise". On 2/28/23 00:05, Felipe Contreras via ruby-talk wrote: