Why you need multiple Python environments To participate in the contest for the free ticket, follow the steps on the end of this LinkedIn article before March 4. March), the biggest European conference on machine learning, ai, and deep learning applications. So why exactly do you need Python environments? You might ask: shouldn’t I just install the latest Python version? Win a free ticket for the Machine Learning Prague Conference (20-22. If you’ve opened this article, chances are that you already know what Python is, why it is a great tool, and you even have a Python installed on your computer. Thus, my main motivation for writing this article was to help current and potential Python users to have a better understanding of how to manage such environments. I’ve been teaching it for quite some time now, and according to my experience, establishing Python environments is a challenging topic. I have over two decades of professional experience as a developer, I know a wide variety of frameworks and programming languages, and one of my favorites is Python. You cannot, or, better, you shouldn't, use the system's installation in your virtual environment, as this would defy the purpose of having a virtual environment in the first place and could easily lead to a broken system.This is how a perfect Python environment looks like 😉 So, in your case in which you wanted to use Python 3.8 in my_env, Python 3.8 would have to be downloaded again, since, as said before, the environment's Python version is independent of the main OS's version. In the case of Python specifically, this is one of the most common reasons that users end up with a broken system. It has the big advantage that all packages installed in it won't affect the ones that come preinstalled with the OS, so they can be handled (updated, downgraded, removed, etc.) separately, effectively eliminating breakages of the main system due to unsatisfied dependencies, etc. Using the commands conda activate my_env and conda install python=3.8 you first tell conda to activate the virtual environment named my_env and then install Python 3.8 in it.Ī virtual environment is an environment (think of it as a special folder) that is used to install Python (or another supported language), as well as packages and their dependencies, independently from the main OS. What you observed is correct and is exactly how conda is supposed to work.

How to change conda python version