[Dunedan]

> I believe that Debian based systems link to some version of Python 2.

Since Debian 11 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS it's a matter of installing the matching package:

python-is-python2 [1] for having /usr/bin/python link to Python 2.7, python-is-python3 [2] for having /usr/bin/python link to Python 3.x or none of them to avoid having /usr/bin/python at all. The latter one will still result in a working system, as all Python scripts shipped by Debian/Ubuntu nowadays explicitly specify /usr/bin/python2 or /usr/bin/python3.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/python-is-python2

[2]: https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/python-is-python3

[jfrunyon]

Oh god. No, not having a `/usr/bin/python` will not result in a working system. Does Debian really think they're the only software distributor that their users use?

[teddyh]

No, which is why the “python-is-python2” and “python-is-python3” packages exist.

[jfrunyon]

Great! Except that apparently, you can have neither of those packages installed.