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Comment by andrewjrangel | Hacker News Reader

I can confirm that this works great on the M1 Max. It has been taking less than a minute to run the model and generate the images. So far I have been really satisfied with the output. Let's please make one-click installers the norm for future technology. I love nerding out, but wading through dependency hell is not worth it most of the time.

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You're right. On top of that, python dependency / package management is a joke.

Normally it's fine, but Apple have decided to force everyone into installing a conda python alongside normal python, which makes everything way more complicated than it needs to be.

It's bad either way. Should be easy like npm.

I feel like I'm maybe missing some context here, because I've never had to install "conda Python" on any Mac ever. I had the system Python and a Homebrew-installed Python happily co-existing, and at various points have had "virtualized" Pythons installed via virtualenv or pipx. On Apple Silicon Macs there's no Python installed by default at all.

Now, I've seen an awful lot of programs written in Python that decide to force you to install them with virtualenv or pipx, but that's not Apple's doing.

> On Apple Silicon Macs there's no Python installed by default at all.

Not true. There's no python2 anymore, but there is a python3. You can find it at /usr/bin/python3 (most likely your homebrew install preceeds it in your PATH)

Which doesn't work, unless you have Xcode or the Command Line Tools installed.

In my experience, quite a few libraries only worked when pulled from conda, due to the whole M1-compatible compilation thing. So while Apple does not force you to install conda, in practice you kind of are forced.

This is/has been changing slowly, though. Things are much better then they were a year ago.

You do if you want Apple's metal support for tensorflow.

This isn't true.

The best way to install Python on a mac is the downloadable installer from Python.org (!)

It can be complicated and frustrating getting Stable Diffusion (or indeed, anything related to ML, in my experience) running on other OSs too. It's not really related to Apple's approach to Python.

Which would be less of an issue if I didn't have to fix a conda bug while installing StableDiffusion.

https://github.com/conda/conda/pull/11818

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