Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: "Loris Bennett" Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Best practise for managing Conda environments? Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:14:14 +0200 Organization: FUB-IT, Freie =?utf-8?Q?Universit=C3=A4t?= Berlin Lines: 34 Message-ID: <87cxu566uh.fsf@zedat.fu-berlin.de> References: <118tbku$liki$1@dont-email.me> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de HWR/ORjFuhOFH/C35SucnwVx4Ow/3I3UJz1eMLLW1ipNuv Cancel-Lock: sha1:icD30i0mbrkA2Jz2yOzTEY7Kbzo= sha1:gS+fziu4T/qtp29+37y0SjFCd28= sha256:IKrcPI2POkAg2sK30U1Vdtm65+0Qj4FvHga9HYNl0U4= User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:198049 Lawrence D’Oliveiro writes: > On 21 Sep 2026 09:17:29 GMT, Martin Schöön wrote: > >> I am a full time Linux user and moved from pip to conda for managing >> my Python life a few years ago. I am not an advanced conda user by >> any measure. For the most part moving to conda was a good idea. > > My impression of Conda is that it’s more suited to Windows/Mac > environments which lack native package management. For example, I > don’t see a package for Conda under Debian -- surely something as > useful as that is made out to be, would be supported. But it’s not. > > The most complex piece of third-party Python-based code that I install > is Jupyter, and that goes quite nicely into a virtualenv maintained > with pip. I help run a Linux HPC system at a university and see Conda being used by research mainly from the life sciences. I think the main advantage is that Conda also provides non-Python dependencies, such as CUDA for GPU-processing or numerical libraries written in C, such as BLAS. If, as Martin mentions, you are using Windows or MacOS, this is probably quite helpful. However, if you are on a Linux machine, the OS packages plus pip within a venv will, in my experience, get you quite a long way. That, together with poetry, has been all I have needed for developing my own software with Python, but obviously YMMV, Cheers, Loris -- This signature is currently under constuction.