I’m sorry but there’s not much new being brought up in this discussion right now.
We’re re-treading points made earlier in the thread (starting ~post 30-35) and arguing about whether the PEP 668 behaviours are good / virtual environments are good etc… which isn’t really going to get us anywhere new.
There’s even a similar pattern of “here’s a suggestion / disagree with suggestion because I-don’t-like-it” happening, that happened earlier in the thread.
Discussing whether virtual environments are a good solution isn’t going to change anything at this point – it’s the relevant thing that the Python ecosystem has today, protection of the system packages is deemed important by the Linux distro maintainers, PEP 668 formalised a mechanism to prevent system breakage (with an escape hatch) with distro maintainers all preferring to guide users towards virtual environments / pipx.
To me, it feels like we’re re-litigating the whole externally-managed saga every few months – it happened when the initial end-user rollout happened with Kali Linux, and with each major distro after. We discussed the whole saga here again when this topic was opened, then again a few months after the discussion settled down here, and we’re doing so again now. We knew this was likely to be disruptive to end users relying on doing things that could break Linux distros’ tools.
Unless someone has a concrete suggestion for what we can change/improve here (which should maybe become a new thread), I don’t think there’s much ground left to cover. To be honest, even looking at this from a perspective of “OK, what can we do here?”… there isn’t really an easy answer here that I can see and I think that’d be a much more productive discussion anyway.
I’d honestly like it if a moderator would close this topic at this point (possibly breaking out the current discussion) – the original concern around the top SO question having bad guidance has been resolved a few months ago.