conda VS miniforge

Python's venv module is officially recommended for creating virtual environments since Python 3.5 comes packaged with your Python installation. While there still are additional older tools available, such as conda and virtualenv, if you are new to virtual environments, it is best to use venv now.

conda's dependency solver solves a harder problem than pip's. This quote alludes to it "Conda will never be as fast as pip, so long as we're doing real environment solves and pip satisfies itself only for the current operation." (from https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7239). Thus mamba was created to improve performance and now conda is bringing in that performance boost.

The other challenge I ran into sometimes was that if I was running a lower memory/storage Codespace instance, when I tried to use Conda from the command line to modify environments, the process would be killed after a few seconds. This turns out to be related to some performance issues Conda has that make it consume a lot of memory when trying to work with the conda-forge installation channel. You can always then just increase the size of the Codespace your are working with (just go to your Codespaces list and use the triple dots to change the settings for a Codespace).

It's worth noting that [ana]conda isn't even fully compatible yet with 3.11 (you can use it to create 3.11 environments--and you really should rather than waiting on relying on the system python--but conda itself can only run on 3.10.

It took some time but as great Christmas present Miniconda was finally released with Python 3.10!

The September update broke it.

According to this this issue is high on their priority list (whatever that means).

Nope they don't use venv for any of the oobabooga# variants nor is it recommended for the git version. I'm using https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge#mambaforge-pypy3 (better version of the recommended conda) for the git variant. The oobabooga* variant uses micro/miniconda (I suck with names) which you can easily drop into with cmd_?something? and does it all internally. Like whoever built that whole environment setup for the _windows/linux/mac did a great job.

wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-aarch64.sh .

Mambaforge!

Just to further clarify: you don't need mamba to avoid the Anaconda distribution. The place you get mambaforge also supplies (and originally supplied) miniforge, which is miniconda with conda-forge set as the default channel. All the *forge installers do in this regard is automatically set conda-forge as the default (and only) channel, which is something one can do manually with miniconda.

I'd recommend using miniforge if you're comfortable with CLIs, otherwise https://www.anaconda.com/.

Tip 1: To use less of your Codespaces resources start with a smaller image like Miniconda or Miniforge and install only what you need.

miniforge, no need to deal with conda environments anymore. https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge