- no clean way to freeze / update
- no good way to distribute a standalone executable
- binary packaging is still a mess
- big libs like GUI framewok are still terrible depend on
- compilation solutions like the awesome nuitka requires a lot of manual work
- too many things to know
For a beginer it's hell. I haven't been a beginer in 10 years, but I train people in Python for a living, and I know it's a pain point.
- pip and setuptools maintainers break everything quite often*
- basically no mobile support what so ever for packaging
(* quite often you say, skeptically? Well, they completely screwed it up twice this year already. That's twice more than any other package manager I use)
I'm on Win10, and pyinstaller made it easy to create an .exe for Windows, but I could find no way on Earth to assemble an executable for Mac.
As it happened I just asked a tech-savvy colleague on a Mac to use pyinstaller on their machine, and it worked, but still - I'm really impressed with Python generally, but this seems like a surprising and considerable oversight.
I just thought it was interesting quite how hard it turned out to be! As someone who's usually on the games/VR side of things, I may have taken some of the magic that Unity, for example, uses to compile to all sorts of platforms for granted.
Other operating systems apart from Mac OS should be much easier to run in a VM, and where they're not, I'd blame that more on the creators of the OS's themselves rather than on Python.
Are you a beginner in general maybe? Because that's either arcane, damn difficult to setup or nigh impossible in tons of other languages too -- even ones that actually do produce executables to work (which Python by default does not).
(And of course you can always just create the executable on a vm -- no need to buy a computer running the other OS).
But my work has, until this year, rarely involved compiling software for other people to use. So that may be the noobness you're detecting.
Whereas, from my experience, it's usually a pain in the ass to set up.
But hey, you can use VMs to hit a lot of these targets.