Welcome to pixi Discussions!

[ruben-arts]

👋 Welcome!

We’re using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community. We hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we
  build together 💪.

To get started, comment below with an introduction of yourself and tell us about what you do with this community.

[twrightsman]

Hello! I'm a graduate student experimenting with machine learning models for crop plant genomic data. I use Conda and conda-libmamba-solver to mange all of my GPU machine learning environments with minimal headache.

pixi excites me for many reasons:

1. No (base) environment to accidentally mess up
2. No complex installer, just copy a single binary to $PATH
3. Potentially easier to package upstream into Debian than base Conda
   • doing sudo apt install pixi would be a dream!
4. Defaults to conda-forge (I think?)

I typically tend to create a few environments for a given project in an envs/ directory and activate among them as needed. I suppose I can adapt pixi to this use case by just running pixi shell inside the respective environment project directory instead of conda activate?

[ruben-arts]

He @twrightsman, I'm sorry for missing this message!

Really good to hear that you're already having a good experience with the conda ecosystem and that you're exited about pixi!

Your correct about all your reasons, the apt install might be a longer journey but never say never!

The pixi shell's can be overlapped as you mention. This is however not how we designed pixi to be used, so we don't really support this behavior.

In the future we will possibly have the ability to define multiple environments in one pixi.toml maybe you would be interested in that!

[twrightsman]

All good @ruben-arts !

I have some familiarity with Debian packaging so when pixi stabilizes a bit I can help organize that effort, if needed.

Regarding pixi shell, do you mean activating nested environments? I don't have a need for that, but that seems potentially cool :) like an OSTree overlay. I would exit any active environment before activating another. I can see how nested envs would quickly become a pain to debug.

[ruben-arts]

That's good to know!

Ah yeah I thought you where talking about nested once indeed.