As a developer you might want to work with different development environments. As an example, I had to work with Java 1.4, 1.5, 1.7 and 1.8 :D . When JDK changes all other stuff such as maven will also have to change. One thing you can do is have everything in you bashrc or bash_profile and comment and uncomment the required environment variables. Believe me, I did that for a long time. du