[JohnFen]

It strikes me that virtual environments are a fairly ugly hack to smooth over the fact that Python is not a stable language. It changes a lot, requiring the use of particular runtimes for particular Python code, requiring the installation of multiple runtimes.

That's a pretty serious downside to the language. Virtual environments are needed to help people deal with that downside.

[bombolo]

Uh? To me they're just a convenient quick way to install stuff that I don't want to install system-wide, if I want to do some quick experimenting.

The normal, permanent, stuff gets installed system wide the normal way, with apt.