The entire problem of python an venv IMO comes from it not being the default.
For workstations, absolutely, go with virtual environments, it's the only way to go. One concern I've seen from some in the machine learning space is that rebuilding a virtual environment, for example if macOS upgrades the Python version, takes hours. That can be solved by using pyenv, then you can have multiple versions of Python and be free of Anaconda. I primarily use pyenv to be sure that I have the same Python version that ships with the server OS on my laptop.
If you are looking into a system you are unfamiliar with, where do you look first?... pip? pipx? homebrew?... or is it in anaconda? pyenv?... must be in the os package manager... apt? pacman?
Honestly, Maven and NPM look great compared to this mess.
Python isn't as bad as people make it out to be. There are some issue that you will run into if your project/code base becomes really large, but that's not an issue for most people. The vast majority can get just use python -mvenv .venv to set up a virtual environment and install in that using pip.
Next step up is you need specific versions of Python, so you switch to pyenv, which functions mostly like the built in virtualenv.
Then you have the special cases where you need to lock dependencies much hard than pip can do and you use poetry, pip is to slow so you use pipx. Those are edge cases to be honest. That's not to say that they aren't solving very real problem, but mostly you don't need it.
It would be great if there was one tools that could do it all, lock the Python version, do quick dependency resolution and lock them down.
So far Python has opted to split the problem: Tools for locking the Python version, tools for creating separate environments and tools for managing packages. There's a lot of crossover in the first two, but you can pretty much mix and match virtual environment tools and package managers anyway you like. I think that's pretty unique.
I actually recently had to fix something small in a Python project, pip refused to work because of homebrew, homebrew didn't have the dependencies and directed me to pipx, pipx finally worked - It was a strange experience.
And for the record NPM mostly has a bad reputation because of its past... nowadays it's perfectly usable and can lock dependencies and node version "out of the box".
The tooling that ships with Python could be much better, I'd agree with that. You can go pretty far with venv and pip, but just the python3 -mvenv .venv isn't exactly a great example of user friendliness at work.
(P)NPM and CJS is the best package/dependency management there currently is.
https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/extern...
IMO the idea that a 'Linux admin' is better informed than a 'Linux user' is increasingly anachronistic. In most cases the admin is just the user running sudo. I'd suggest that such functionality should be enabled by installing some kind of OS package rather than being the default
[global]
break-system-packages = true
It becomes increasingly impossible to track down home directory pollution and config files in Python. Next step will be a Python registry on Linux. How about:
regedit VENV=/home/sjw/venv42 KEYWORD=single-version-externally-managed DWORD=0xbadbee export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true