You can save a little bit of copy-paste that will take a few minutes at most. If you do it, you can work directly with your own files, work offline, control the hardware, etc. I think it's simpler than this guide makes out too, as it tries to minimise the amount of space used, which is often not needed. Installing Anaconda instead of Miniconda would get you pretty much set up in one step, plus a single copy-paste step if you want all the packages the book uses.

Worth mentioning Jupyter Lite in this context too.

Warning: This link will open a Jupyter notebook in your browser:

  https://jupyter.org/try-jupyter/lab/

It's worked pretty smoothly for me so far. I can't vouch for how it handles big data sets or obscure libraries, but seems like a pretty good starting point for those who are learning Python. It has become how I prefer to share simple notebooks with colleagues too.

But either of these options is nice for dealing with the situation of getting a beginner through the Python installation process. Another is WinPython, which is my preferred environment for local installation.

Downloading an installing Anaconda is pretty much painless and gives you more flexibility (and better responsiveness) than collab.

I think there may be many a use case where the data being operated on cannot be shared with third parties.

Absolutely true, but learning things that hard way was worth it to me. Plus I am old-fashioned enough to like doing things on my own hardware and not necessarily wanting to share my data/code every time for reasons of security or modesty (as in embarrassingly basic). I do like what Colab offers and appreciate having all that processing power/infrastructure available.

Are there anything like this online that could run stuff written for pygame? I know lots of beginners start with Scratch, but having some type of gaming in the browser for Python would be nice.

Although this is true I find these online notebooks awfully slow