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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

uv has does not (nor do they plan to add) support for conda, and that is a deal-breaker.

I can't see why anyone is using Conda in 2025. In 2018, yeah, pip (now uv) was hard and you could get a "just works" experience installing Tensorflow + NVIDIA on Conda. In 2023 it was the other way around and it still is.

Well, when you're building python packages that have non python dependencies and a big chunk of your users are on Windows, conda is the only option, even in 2025 :)

Examples include, quant libraries, in-house APIs/tools, etc.

Conda worked for me in the past, but at some point I was getting inexplicable segfaults from Python scripts. I switched back to just pip and everything worked fine again. And installation was much faster.

That was basically my experience. At one time conda made my life easier, eventually it made it impossible.

Circa 2018, I figured out how to pack up the CUDA libraries inside conda for Windows so I could have different conda environments with different versions of CUDA which was essential back then because if you had a model that was written w/ a certain version of Tensorflow you had to have a matching CUDA and if you used NVIDIA's we-need-your-email-address installers you could only have one version of CUDA installed at a time.

Worked great except for conda making the terrible mistake of compressing package files with bzip2 which took forever to decompress for huge packages.

I see no reason you can't install any kind of non-Python thing that a Python system wants with uv because a wheel is just a ZIP file, so long as it doesn't need to be installed in a particular place you can just unpack it and go.

For that matter, you can install arbitrary content from a wheel with Pip.

The problem is all the things that do need to be installed in a particular place. Linux seems to have a lot of those, especially if they're build-time dependencies for something else. Hence the need for, and slow development of, https://peps.python.org/pep-0725/ (relevant background, though I'm sure you know this sort of stuff: https://pypackaging-native.github.io/ ).

I’m on Windows and I categorically refuse to install Conda. It’s not necessary.

Why would it be a deal breaker? uv would replace conda. And I hope it does. Conda has been such a headache for me when I've used it in the past. If the Python (particularly ML/academic community) could move on from conda it would be a great thing.

uv can’t replace conda, any more than it can replace apt or nix.

Conda packages general binary packages, not just python packages. uv is just python packages.

Python packages (distributed via the Python package index, PyPI) can also be general binary packages. Try pip install cmake, for example.

Yes, but there are restrictions; for one thing, it's not trivial to share binary dependencies between Python packages; conda just handles that.

Pixi might be something worth looking for, if you want a uv conda equivalent

pixi seems fine, but it also is just using mamba on the backend so you might as well continue to use miniforge

Fun fact: pixi uses uv as a library to install pypi packages!

Interesting, will check it out.

That doesn't make sense, respectfully.

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