My compromise (I teach hundreds Python in live classes each year) is to use IDLE for my Python fundamentals course. It is not the best environment, but it (gen

My compromise (I teach hundreds Python in live classes each year) is to use IDLE for my Python fundamentals course. It is not the best environment, but it (generally ) works in Mac/Linux/Win, and it allows them to work on their own computer. This sidesteps environments, but also doesn't make them dependent on having the internet or other services. On the flipside I teach an analytics class for my alma mater and there we use Colab. Again, sidestepping install completely. I justify it as these folks are more interested in leveraging the tools of Python (matplotlib, sklearn, pandas) and don't necessarily want to be software engineers. For the motivated few who want to install locally I give them a guide [0]. 0 - https://www.metasnake.com/blog/pydata-dev.html https://www.metasnake.com/blog/pydata-dev.html