I'd suggest looking into arkose . As it's manpage says, it is a "tool to make sandboxing desktop application easy," but it can also be used for purposes like yours.

It's author, Stéphane Graber described how he uses it to keep from having to install many dependencies while doing development on his blog:

Since I last reinstalled my laptop, I try to keep my usually insanely
long list of installed packages to a bare minimum. I’d usually have
hundreds if not thousands of libraries and development packages as
these are required by a bunch of packages I maintain or code I work
on.

To achieve this and still be as productive as before (if not more),
I’m using arkose quite a lot to generate temporary dev/build
environment that are wiped as soon as I close the shell. This helps
maintain the number of extra libraries to a minimum, avoiding
situations where something mysteriously works fine on my laptop but
not on another machine and avoids the maintenance needed when dealing
with chroots.

Run, arkose -h in a terminal. This will create a container that has direct access to your home directory but uses copy-on-write for the rest of the file-system. When you're done, exit the shell and all your changes outside of /home (i.e. all the packages you installed) will be thrown away.