The solution was fairly easy though, we updated the default pip.ini we distributed with the Anaconda install to include a user=false flag (forget the specific config). A user would pip install something, pip would default to user install because the base directory is read only, and then all of a sudden their Spyder installation would no longer work. The problem was that pip -user install is fundamentally at odds with conda environments, and would often break even the base environment. I have some real world experience of this causing issues, I managed an Anaconda distribution at a large enterprise and for technical and cultural reasons it made sense to make the base install of Anaconda read-only and users who wanted Python with other packages could use venv or conda to create their own environments. I personally have no particular stake in the current behaviour, it was designed mainly to handle the concerns of Unix users and distro maintainers, where the ergonomics may be different. But that’s getting a bit out of scope here…įeel free to raise an issue on pip proposing a better behaviour. conda (and I typically run pip with -dry-run first for that reason, despite it taking twice the time and effort).

That would have avoided the overwhelming majority of issues (on different platforms and on both *conda and ) I’d ran into where an environment got screwed up due to either user error (installing in the wrong env, wrong interpreter, with/without sudo, the wrong spec, or some other issue) or packaging issues, and is the single biggest feature I miss vs. dry-run, preferably in a more readable format) before doing it and asking for confirmation. Honestly, if it were up to me, now that pip has a solver and dry run support, I’d much rather it act like most package managers (either by default or at least with an option) and display what it is going to do (i.e. I almost always work in venvs, so if I forget to activate one, I’d rather pip fail or prompt than silently install into -user if I don’t deliberately sudo it at least one time this happened, it resulted in a very laborious cleanup and reinstall effort. Personally, when I’m on Linux, I’d especially prefer pip giving an error or prompting for confirmation to fall back to a user install, though for slightly different reasons as on Windows.

Python 3 install pip