[moogie]

Or you don't want to hose your system python, or you don't want to shit all over any other work you may be doing, or you want to ever test on anything other than a single (probably polluted if you're screwing around using your system python for everything) environment, or you're a professional using python, or if you want to be taken at all seriously....the list goes on! And yeah, using your system python means you're either not doing any professional/serious work or you're a hack who needs to stop doing anything professionally/seriously.

[mixmastamyk]

Never happened in twenty years.

Manually installed packages are already segregated and can be uninstalled ya know. Might be a problem if you have no admin skills.

[moogie]

Way to miss the point!...all of them! Nobody said anything about manually installed packages being unsegregated or immutable, so let's not put up any more straw men. It's just a stupid way to work.

I think you may be the one without admin skills if you think working on your system Python is anything except reckless. No one cares that you have 20 years of doing it like that, it's a poor argument and shows up a really bad attitude.

[mixmastamyk]

Your appeal to absolutes reeks of immaturity, lack of experience, and cargo-cult reasoning.

On the contrary, if it rarely to never happens compared to the effort involved, it's not "reckless" at all, but a tradeoff. The site package folders are a simple path of files/folders, not hard to reason about. Nothing gets "hosed" without your participation. No need to live in mortal fear. In other words the cure is as bad as the disease.

The truth is that venvs are a hack with a lot fewer use cases now that user packages at the low-end and containers at the mid/high-end are now ubiquitous.

Honestly newbies would be a lot better off just avoiding venvs entirely. I make an exception for pipenv when appropriate since it hides the complexity as well as possible.