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I totally disagree with ditching miniconda. The Colab notebooks that make use of it have been super easy to run and modify. There is documentation everywhere and its very easy to find on SO, and Google. Its a joy to use and really like it for all of my Python workloads. I think of it like a Python VM that just works where ever I place it... so far, haven't been let down.

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Miniconda is a pain as it introduces it's own package build format that (IMHO) just isn't very good. It might have been an improvement on python's binary packages when it was released, but now days the conda package format creates more problems than it solves.

>I think of it like a Python VM that just works where ever I place it.

That's called a virtualenv, which is a feature built into python. Miniconda is a thin wrapper around virtualenv (actual python packages) and the conda package format. If you're using an IDE it probably has virtualenv support baked in.

Personally I prefer to use python-poetry for managing virtual envs, but honestly just using the virtualenv command directly is not hard if you're already using conda from the CLI.

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