Only Linux 64 support

[akvachan]

This is awful. I went through 69 circles of hell with your anaconda distribution of habitat-sim and did not manage to install it on win64, neither on arm64. Virtualisation of linux64 is just not available for me. It seems that you are building poor software that only a very limited group of people can run and use. Why there is no clear support for full pip installation? Why did not you compile project for win64? Why are you not poroviding out-of-the-box solutions for google colab etc?

When I see software like this, coming from Meta, I lose hope and I just cannot trust you.

My main issues summarized:

1. pip install is only experimental.
2. conda packages are availabel only for linux64 and osx64 (are you kiddding me).
3. no google colab notebooks
4. a lot of steps to do, e.g. why not combine habitat-lab and habitat-sim under one package (and install it with pip install habitat)?

[aclegg3]

@akvachan sorry to hear about your frustration.

To be clear, we do not support Windows due a variety of constraints and hurdles coupled with the fact that very few compute clusters are based on that OS. Habitat is designed as a large-scale training tool, primarily for use on compute clusters. Supporting Windows does not appear to benefit the community greatly enough to justify the work at this time.

We provide Habitat for a known, tested set of dependency versions on Linux and OSX, as that has the greatest user base for the intended audience.

Please understand that we provide the AI-Habitat software stack as a free resource to the community for the advancement of Embodied AI research. We are a research team, not a product team. We are also community-driven! If you feel Windows support is crucial to your use of the platform, and worth your time, feel free to work on the solution and contribute it back to the project.

On the topic of Colab: the underlying system foundation for Colab is constantly shifting. This was resulting in a negative experience for users as the scripts would intermittently stop working and our development team had to divert from other efforts to fix things. For this reason, we decided not to continue supporting Colab moving forward.