https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2016/08/25/conda-myths-and-mi...
> Myth #5: conda doesn't work with virtualenv, so it's useless for my workflow
> Reality: You actually can install (some) conda packages within a virtualenv, but better is to use Conda's own environment manager: it is fully-compatible with pip and has several advantages over virtualenv.
> [...] the result seems to be fairly brittle – for example, trying to conda update python within the virtualenv fails in a very ungraceful and unrecoverable manner, seemingly related to the symlinks that underly virtualenv's architecture.
Doesn't sound like much of a myth then, if Conda's take on virtualenv is "you can technically do this, but everything will break ungracefully and unrecoverably, so please don't".
At the end, one of his conclusions is: "If you want to install Python packages within an Isolated environment, pip+virtualenv and conda+conda-env are mostly interchangeable". So don't change if you don't have to.
But he does give reasons why conda may be superior to virtualenv -- managing different version of Python, tracking non-Python dependencies, true isolation of environments, etc.
Edit: correction, there are two examples that take longer, one at 3.5 minutes, one around 8 minutes. I don’t think it changes any takeaways though.
It’s funny to me that you would expect operations involving “conda install anaconda” to be fast though. 11 minutes seems perfectly fast for that and would be comparable to pip or anything else if doing that huge of a set of package installs.
That is not at all a “trivial environment” like you said previously.