Early on in my career, I had to do a project in Python, together with another junior. Neither of us had any clue how to handle Python and he was on Windows, so, if I remember correctly, he had to install some dependencies from Pipenv, others from Conda, and his setup would break every two weeks in novel ways.

Eventually, we became quite good at installing a working setup, but correctly removing the broken setup was a pain. Often times, I thought that just reinstalling the whole OS would be quicker. 🫠

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Every now and then a new hire comes along with a windows pc, every time they decide they want to try to get everything working on windows, after a week they give up.

On linux it's one pip install and you're done

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

On linux it’s one pip install and you’re done

Isn't that how packages/dependencies work on windows as well? Once I got pip updated, I've never had any issues with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No clue, all i know is that i never have to do more than that, and noone has managed to get it working on windows 🤷‍♂️

When i started learning programming, everything was always a pain to set up, needed to install weird IDEs from shady websites and they only worked half the time. Then a friend showed me linux where stuff just worked out of the box, just slap some code in a textfile and compile it, i never looked back (was working in c/c++ but from what i've seen it's not much better for python)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Since some wsl features started coming with windows out of the box python has been pretty trivial to install. It's a far cry from the conda/cygwin nightmare hell scape it used to be

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I believe, it's because various Python libraries ship with a pre-compiled C/C++/Rust library. That library needs to be compiled for a specific target, and you often only get Linux x86_64 on Pypi, because that's what most library devs use themselves.

Conda tries to solve that by providing a separate repository, where they do have builds for more targets available, but as a result, they have fewer libraries available in that repo. That's why we needed to install some via Conda and some via Pipenv/Pypi.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Last time I checked, it was way easier in Windows to have a VM running Linux just for Python, than to get Python to reliably work nativelly in Windows.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

We have a development system for python on Windows at work, works very well also.

On linux is one pip install, buy maybe first do a venv^^