I used to have a rule of, never use pip and only use Ubuntu's/Debian's packaged versions. That works pretty well if you're happy with the packaged versions and

I used to have a rule of, never use pip and only use Ubuntu's/Debian's packaged versions. That works pretty well if you're happy with the packaged versions and you don't need unpackaged libraries. I now have the rule of, only ever use pip inside a venv. If your venv is more than a little bit complex, write a requirements.txt file so you can generate it. So it's something like $ cat > requirements.txt << EOF tensorflow Django==3.2.5 cryptography EOF $ echo venv > .gitignore $ python3 -m venv venv $ venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt $ venv/bin/python or, if you prefer, $ . venv/bin/activate (venv)$ pip install -r requirements.txt (venv)$ python Then when your Python version changes, or you get confused about what's installed, or whatever, you can just blow away the entire venv and recreate it: $ rm -r venv $ python3 -m venv venv $ venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt and you're in a known-good place. Either of these rules works fine. The thing that works poorly is using pip install outside of a venv (with or without root).