[etbebl]

I get that the scope of the article is a bit larger than this, but it's a pet peeve of mine when authors acknowledge the advantages of conda and then dismiss it for...silly? reasons. It kind of sounds like they just don't know many people using it, so they assume something must be wrong with it.

> If you don’t need compiled extensions, Conda is more than you need.

Am I missing something or isn't that exactly the problem we're talking about here?

> And even when you do need it, conda environments are heavier than virtual environments and the resolver used to be infamously slow. Mamba exists largely because conda’s dependency resolution took forever on nontrivial environments.

Like it says here, speed isn't a problem anymore - mamba is fast. And it's true that the environments get large; maybe there's bloat, but it definitely does share package versions across environments when possible, while keeping updates and such isolated to the current environment. Maybe there's a space for a language package manager that tries to be more like a system package manager by updating multiple envs at once while staying within version constraints to minimize duplication, but idk if many developers would think that is worth the risk.

[elehack]

Mamba is fast, and Pixi is also fast + sands a lot of the rough edges off the Conda experience (with project/environment binding and native lock files).

Not perfect, but pretty good when uv isn't enough for a project or deployment scenario.