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Comment by phowon | Hacker News Reader

As someone who aggressively uses conda, I do think one of its downsides is how heavy it is. I agree that it's a good one-stop-shop if you want to get an environment up and running with no issues. But if you're not doing any scientific computing for a given project, it might help to use something more lightweight.

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I've had to 'debug' quite a few (ana)conda setups, mostly ones that were used for scientific work, where the whole python setup got so messed up that nothing was quite working anymore, both system and conda pythons. I advise against it.

> the whole python setup got so messed up that nothing was quite working anymore, both system and conda pythons

This seems like the biggest downside I've seen mentioned thus far. Can you (or anyone) offer more detail as to how using Conda resulted in corrupting your Python installation? It it similar to what can happen with game mods, or is there something else going on?

This sounds highly implausible, since conda’s number one mode of operation will fully isolate system dependencies into separate environments. It is extremely difficult to misuse conda in a way that would cause this problem, which makes me believe this comment is just trolling.

Sorry, no trolling here. The times I've tried to fix the setups I've lost my patience with it and IIRC got things back working by deleting conda and installing packages through manually homebrew (all Macs). But it wasn't on my machine, so I'm not sure how they got into that state. I think it was due to using a wide range of IDE's/environments that all tried to manage their own packages and load paths, combined with perhaps some manual setup.

Probably Conda is fine if you just commit to it, but I think the users who got into these messes weren't knowledgable enough to oversee the consequences of their actions.

So you could argue that the problem isn't with conda, but with the users. However, it seems that for naive users the consequences of using conda aren't clear (enough), which can get them into a mess.

Hi! I was the conda dev lead for 2.5 years. We work really hard to make sure conda does the Right Thing in unpredictable, almost hostile, environments. It’s a large surface area to guard against, but in general we’ve been incredibly successful.

I hate to hear that you had a bad experience. If it’s at all possible, please provide something on our issue tracker (github.com/conda/conda) we can replicate and write regression tests against. Help us improve on what we’ve missed.

The situation you describe would be actively difficult for new users to create in conda, based on some of the “idiot proof” defaults conda uses and the wide range of other tools (especially pip and native system packages) that the conda developers have made to “just work” in the easiest, out of the box ways.

I use it with good success managing non-scientific and non-Python packages. I think especially with conda-forge, it is just an all purpose package manager and package distributor.

Using the miniconda installer often helps keep it lightweight too, no need for Anaconda in many use cases.

What makes conda heavy?

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