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Actually, you shouldn’t need to add that flag, AFAIK it’s been the default for a while for non-root users. But both Debian and Ubuntu tend to package their Pythons to rely on .deb packages and have been somewhat inconsistent over the years.

Does it try to install packages in your system paths and fails due to lack of permissions?

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You're right, --user seems the default behaviour, I did not realize that. Maybe because it's different in Fedora that I also use? Or maybe I was just plain wrong :)

Anyway, I think this does not change the fact that it's a bad idea to populate your ~/.local/lib with python libs, since it may break some python programs installed via apt for your user, or was that wrong too?

Well, I use Fedora since March (after a lot of Ubuntu) and I don't need --user. I'm on 36.

As to filling your lib with stuff, it depends. AFAICR the default is to search for things there first, because it is assumed the user environment takes precedence.

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