Comment by zahlman
13 hours ago
If I want to install Python on Windows and start using pip, I grab an installer from python.org and follow a wizard. On Linux, I almost certainly already have it anyway.
If I want to bootstrap from uv on Windows, the simplest option offered involves Powershell.
Either way, I can write quite a bit with just the standard library before I have to understand what uv really is (or what pip is). At that point, yes, the pip UX is quite a bit messier. But I already have Python, and pip itself was also trivially installable (e.g. via the standard library `ensurepip`, or from a Linux system package manager — yes, still using the command line, but this hypothetical is conditioned on being a Linux user).
Not many normal people want to install python. Instead, author of the software they are trying to use wants them to install python. So they follow readme, download windows installer as you say, pip this pipx, pipx that conda, conda this requirements.txt, and five minutes later they have magic error telling that tensorflow version they are installing is not compatible with pytorch version they are installing or some such.
The aftertaste python leaves is lasting-disgusting.
Nailed it. Python was my first language, but I dread having to install someone else's Python software!
Scenarios like that are simply not realistic. Besides which, multiple solutions exist for bundling Python with an application.
Scenarios like that occur daily. I do quite a bit of software development and whenever I come across something that really needs python I mentally prepare for a day of battle with the various (all subtly broken) package managers, dependency hell and circular nonsense to the point that I am also ready to give up on it after a day of trying.
Just recently: a build of a piece of software that itself wasn't written in python but that urgently needed a very particular version of it with a whole bunch of dependencies that refused to play nice with Anaconda for some reason (which in spite of the fact that it too is becoming less reliable is probably still the better one). The solution? Temporarily move andaconda to a backup directory, remove the venv activation code from .bashrc and compile the project, then restore everything to the way it was before (which I need it to be because I have some other stuff on the stove that is built using python because there isn't anything else).
And let's not go into bluetooth device support in python, anything involving networking that is a little bit off the beaten path and so on.
Traditional Windows install didn’t include things Microsoft doesn’t make. But, any PC distributor could always include Python as part of their base Windows install with all the other stuff that bloats the typical third party Windows installs. They don’t which indicates the market doesn’t want it. Your indictment of the lack of Python out of the box is less on Windows than on the “distro” served by PC manufacturers