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Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

paulromer.net

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Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#11

Post by freehorse »

stackghost wrote: post #6
kamma4434 wrote: post #2

I’m not sure about what the problem here is. If the target user cannot be bothered to learn about “the shell” why should they care about the Python vendor? And the procedure shown is not easy peasy for a newbie.

TFA is for students who are (presumably) very early in their programming careers. Python is often billed as a good language for beginners because it does not require the author to keep track of curly braces or line-ending semicolons, and it lets the author focus less on syntax and more on reasoning with code. Wouldn't it be nice if the beginner could focus on learning Python instead of having to learn stupid minutiae…

Is dragging and dropping the .zshrc file the easiest way to run anaconda on a mac? It sounds incredibly inconvenient to me, and considering it is intended for people who are clueless about terminal and .zshrc, it may result in a mess with different .zshrc versions in case one installs anything that runs through terminal and changes .zshrc, which can be a lot of things.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#13

Post by gkfbn »

stackghost wrote: post #6
kamma4434 wrote: post #2

I’m not sure about what the problem here is. If the target user cannot be bothered to learn about “the shell” why should they care about the Python vendor? And the procedure shown is not easy peasy for a newbie.

TFA is for students who are (presumably) very early in their programming careers. Python is often billed as a good language for beginners because it does not require the author to keep track of curly braces or line-ending semicolons, and it lets the author focus less on syntax and more on reasoning with code. Wouldn't it be nice if the beginner could focus on learning Python instead of having to learn stupid minutiae…

At some point they'll have to learn about the file system, shell, network. Otherwise there is little point in learning Python.

Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, Julia, R are superior for small programs with just a couple of functions.

Escaping the stranglehold of Python would be the next project!

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#14

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

striking wrote: post #9
fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #5

Clickbait title (“stranglehold”, really?), and also really bad advice. Terminal can be scary, but “open terminal from Applications/Utilities” and typing “rm ~/.zsh” is objectively easier. Also that’s not even the best solution, just a far better way to do this solution.

It sounds like they want to be able to restore it too. And the Terminal is harder to use than a graphical step by step guide.

This guide requires holding down arcane secret key combination, this is not remotely normal way to do anything, and prevents people from learning basic system commands every programmer needs to know.

Also, “mv ~/.zsh ~/zsh-anaconda”.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#15

Post by brewmarche »

You can just keep Anaconda and just use it as a pyenv replacement, e.g.:

  conda create -n "myenv" python=3.8
  conda activate myenv
Then just use pip in your environment, if you don’t like conda packages. Not sure what the paragraph about being able to install multiple Python versions after getting rid of Anaconda is about.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#18

Post by nextos »

I collaborate with people that use macOS while I use Linux. For reproducible environments, Nix has served us well.

Despite the myth, it is not hard to use unless you need to package something complicated or messy. Then it may become hard.

The advantage of Nix is total version reproducibility and declarativeness. It's quite reassuring to know things are exactly the same on all computers.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#19

Post by sunshowers »

kanche wrote: post #8
williamstein wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? Is there a link?

A news on the same: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/08/anaconda_puts_the_squ...

> use by individual hobbyists, students, universities, non-profit organizations, or businesses with less than 200 employees is allowed, and all other usage is considered commercial and thus requires a business relationship with Anaconda

Wow this is so deliberately ambiguous about universities with more than 200 employees. Shameful.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#20

Post by zelphirkalt »

nextos wrote: post #18

I collaborate with people that use macOS while I use Linux. For reproducible environments, Nix has served us well. Despite the myth, it is not hard to use unless you need to package something complicated or messy. Then it may become hard. The advantage of Nix is total version reproducibility and declarativeness. It's quite reassuring to know things are exactly the same on all computers.

I am fully on board with having reproducible declarative setups, line Nix or Guix offer. I want to note though, that the versions and original code may be the same, but it can still happen that something behaves differently on another OS. The code of some version of a package can intentionally do things differently on another OS. So you are not 100% safe from MacOS disturbing things.

I wish though, that at my job people were as far as using Nix oder Guix though. Still a long way off of that. Wish people would explore more on and off the job, to realize the potential.

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