[Flex247A]

If you feel that Anaconda is too heavy, try Miniconda [0]. The base environment is a standard Python 3.9 environment without any additional packages.

[0] https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html

[tandav]

also try mamba which is much faster than conda https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html