Today at least, it is not difficult. As long as you always use a venv and don’t do stupid stuff like install stuff[1] globally in a way that conflicts with system packages (which is more a linux problem, not a python problem, if it’s a problem at all), your system will stay clean.
Sure, what is a problem is that pip install ... is a common suggestion, and from there people get the error about an externally managed environment and then ignore the implications of that warning and work around it. But we can’t help people who don’t read.
packages, scripts, python binaries, other binaries, … ↩︎
We can, and we do. (The externally managed warning is a concrete example of that - many such cases used to just break people’s systems. So is pip switching to user installs as the default outside virtual environments. Even shipping pip by default with CPython falls into that category)
Beginners get a bewildering array of conflicting advice from all sorts of directions, and they don’t have the grounding yet to know what advice is worth listening to and what is best ignored.
When someone shows up with a ladder to help them out of a hole they have fallen into, they don’t need any commentary about the fact that it would have been better to avoid falling into the hole in the first place.
My point is that some people get this message, don’t follow the advice in it or don’t understand it[1], google it, read up on possible solutions on e.g. SO and then decide that the solution that they like the most is disabling the warning by deleting the file and then complain that their system is messed up - those are the people we can’t help.
which is fine ofcourse, no message that is acceptable to be output in a terminal could ever explain thr full context ↩︎
Indeed, I’m finding elsewhere that instead of going to Stack Overflow, that at least has dates on the entries, and has an upvoting system, people are just asking Favorite-GenAI and getting answers drawn from information that was widespread 10 years ago and no longer relevant and nothing to evaluate the response on.