PythonPath / sys.path

[Thomas Passin]

On 5/14/2023 7:28 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 09:22, Thomas Passin <list1 at tompassin.net> wrote:
>> You made a little slam against Windows, but you will find it harder to
>> get things working on Linux.  Ubuntu, like many other Linux distros,
>> does not come with pip and Tk (needed for Idle) installed, and it's not
>> so obvious how to install them.
> 
> The assumption on Linux is usually that you know how to use your
> system's package manager. And on Debian and Ubuntu specifically, it's
> about as easy as you would want: "apt install idle". That'll pull in
> everything you should need. I don't know about other distros but I
> would expect that it's approximately as easy.
> 
> Maybe that's not obvious if you come from Windows, but I'd guess that
> most desktop Linux users will have at least a passing familiarity with
> their package manager, making this a perfectly obvious way to get new
> software.

Well, no, why would you assume that?  I started to use Linux - in VMs - 
because I had to make sure that my cross-platform java/jython Tomcat 
program would work right on Linux.  Why, for example, would I think to 
install Idle from the package manager when it, or things like that, were 
always in my experience installed with pip? For that matter, "sudo 
apt-get install pip" won't install pip.  You need to use a different 
name, and it may or may not be different for different distros.

No, I came to use Linux they way I said, but I didn't find those things 
to be obvious.  That's why I've started mentioning them on this list 
when it seems like they might be useful.

Furthermore, people have been having trouble getting certain PyQt 
programs working on Ubuntu 22.04 (and 20.xx before it) (yes, I know, not 
what the OP asked about). The solution is pretty non-obvious and 
requires a particular .so library file to be installed, if you can 
discover which one and how to do that.  I mention this in support of 
what I said about a Windows Python user being likely to find things 
harder, not easier, on Linux.

And please, let's not start a flame war about this!  I'm passing on what 
I've experienced, that's all.  Yes, I know that there are some Python 
packages that need to be built and that usually works better on Linux. 
And I'll agree that some Python programs are snappier to load and run on 
Linux than on the same machine running Windows, even in a Linux VM guest.