I also think there should be better documentation and guides for people who are encountering virtual environments on their Pi for the first time but apparently I am wrong so I'm not engaging in that discussion again.If the developers of Raspbian force these demands on the newer levels of Raspbian it would be useful if they could issue tutorials on the reason for the changes and tell us how we were expected to behave in future. That would remove the need for our attempts made in the dark to show what was required.
The issue of potentially conflicting Python modules has long been recognised though I believe somewhat over-stated. Virtual environments are a mechanism which can alleviate those problems and have been supported for a long while for those who wanted to use them. Their use was however entirely optional and it was 'opt-in'
Whether forcing use of virtual environments is more a hindrance than a help to Raspberry Pi users has no clear answer, can be argued both ways.
Debian, with the release of Bookworm, decided their default would be to force the use of virtual environments with an 'opt-out' for those who did not want that, preferred 'opt-in'.
Raspberry Pi OS which is ultimately based upon Debian followed their lead and also made enforced use of virtual environments the default for Bookworm. They had a choice not to but obviously decided this was the most appropriate path to take.
The ability to 'opt-out' is still there but not covered by Raspberry Pi documentation and it would not be recommended to do so.
I believe most of the problems come from enforcing virtual environments but not configuring and enabling use of one automatically, leaving the user to do that. Do that and I believe most problems will go away, and those who don't want that can easily disable it. It could even be a 'raspi-config' option.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Fri Sep 05, 2025 4:09 pm