Conda

Conda is a powerful package manager and environment manager. It has a large collection of packages that often are newer than what's installed on your system.

Conda packages are neatly contained under your home directory in an environment. Adding or removing packages does not require root access or server admin.

These Conda environments are most helpful when a package cant be installed globally because it could cause breakage on other users or when you need multiple versions of a package.

Getting started

See the Conda guide: https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/getting-started.html

I advise to go with miniconda because it's smaller without a bunch of extras you'll likely never use.

Quick start guide

Here is a short guide to get you started. Feel free to use a different tag than "mymath".

# Install
wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-py39_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash ./Miniconda*

# if: during the install you included the .bashrc tweak
# then: you can re-login to have the conda command in your path.
# else: run the following script to set your PATH
source ~/miniconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh

# now you can use the conda command. It's advised to create an environment for each project
conda create --name mymath
conda activate mymath
# In your "mymath" environment you can confirm its using it's python using `which python`

# examples installing packages:
conda install openblas gcc_linux-64
conda install mkl gcc_linux-64
conda install scipy numpy imageio ipython matplotlib

# when in a fresh shell you can return to your environment using:
source ~/miniconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
conda activate mymath