Virtual environments are pretty standard. I set up hundreds of virtual environments in my career. But I am asking how to install Python 3.10 on a Debian install, not how to set up a venv.

How does virtual env help with installing Python 3.10 on Debian

I just despise conda, I think it is bloat :D but thanks for the advice

Thanks so much for your efforts writing this up. I will study it and come back if I have any doubts.

The reason I use VirtualBox is simply, that it is the recommendation in the developers guidelines of the project, which is gramps by the way.

I have basic experience with Docker, I managed to build a container that runs with alls dependencies based on alpine, then it struck me - I don’t have a GUI in my container which I need of course to run my IDE and the software itself. I read about X11 forwarding but then wasn’t sure if that is the right way. I am pretty sure one can isolate some things using docker-compose, but it can be frustrating if you want to get into the project codebase and then have to do so much infrastructure stuff.

I guess it is a combination of lack of skills (I derive data from data for my job, ML etc.) and the project itself using outdated methods because of historical development.

But as I said, I need to do my research. Thanks again for your friendly way of explaining things, much appreciated.

It’s not so much about Python itself but the libraries it uses. I experienced very often that the module maintainers for specific libraries require time to port to a newer Python version, and if it only means testing it against it. This is why I have the habit of staying on “2 version older” than the current release. As a data scientist this always made sense for me, I cannot count the times an environment broke because there was a conflict with the Python version. I guess you are right and it probably runs fine. I just wanted to set up my development environment right the first time to save some struggle later. Thanks for your input.

Now I found a use case for UV! I am a long time venv user and was always struggling to understand why I should add another complex layer of software into my pipeline. Also when I last tried UV, the recommended way to install it was piping arbitrary code from curl into bash, but maybe that has changed. I have a look, thanks!

That is a good solution to my problem - but what is the problem with Debian? Am I too old, and is it a bad idea to install a specific Python installation directly into the system?

It requires Python > 3.10, but it is not tested very well and I don’t want to provoke incompatibilities. There is no need to run Python 3.13.

I know venv pretty well, but it does not do it for this project. It’s not about isolating the Python libraries, but the system libraries and more importantly the databases the program itself creates. Also I would never install packages into a Python system installation.