It depends on how sophisticated your needs are. I mostly run python programs of my own on a single computer. I tell the distribution-provided pip to install a

It depends on how sophisticated your needs are. I mostly run python programs of my own on a single computer. I tell the distribution-provided pip to install an upgraded pip separately (pip3 install --user -U). I install everything using pip3 install --user and under no circumstances run any pip commands as root. So far, I have not needed foo-env or docker.