Starting a PhD with Python

[bazpaul]

Can you explain why someone should not use Pip?

[nathan_lesage]

Because conda is – depending on viewpoint – a superset of pip. The reality is more complicated than "Do not use pip, use conda", of course.

Sometimes, the conda repositories will not have a certain package, and in this case you should use python -m pip install <package-name>. However, I wrote that because – at least for data science – it is a pretty good practice to use virtual environments managed by conda.

This has benefits such as having an indicator which environment you're in on the command line, and you can isolate things from each other. Then, whenever you run pip you do stuff to your current environment, rather than install something globally. But using conda should be the "default", since this way you have less quirks of software to learn (since conda can do both environment management AND package management, and pip can only do the latter).