Products · Product
Conda
Raised as a usability problem by 28 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2018–2025), in 28 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Packages work on one machine but fail unpredictably on anotherUnreviewed
20182026- Dependency installs get stuck, forcing the user to abandon conda after lengthy troubleshooting2024-11-05
- Conda is very slow and Mamba's package solves fail on some systems2024-07-09
- Conda is absurdly slow for nearly any operation, even on powerful machines2024-02-15
Dependency resolution is very slowUnreviewed
20182026- Installing packages became extremely slow, taking minutes to hours or forever2022-07-20
- Dependency resolution is very slow2021-10-04
- Slow dependency resolution ends in a useless error message when it fails2020-11-12
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 33 complaints
- Environment solving is slow, and mixed Python and non-Python setups are hard to understand2025-08-13
- Segfaults with conda that were hard to trace to their source2025-03-17
- Feels slow and annoying, often creates more problems than it solves2025-02-19
- Solving environments takes 20-60 minutes or fails, and commands are opaque and hard to remember2025-02-19
- Text is hard to read on mobile because long words do not break2024-12-16
- Dependency installs get stuck, forcing the user to abandon conda after lengthy troubleshooting2024-11-05
- Can't find any way to satisfy dependencies when installing snakemake2024-11-05
- Environments detached from project directories encourage bad practices and broken dependency resolutions2024-09-30
- Chaotic build output and hard-to-find answers to undocumented issues2024-07-09
- Conda is very slow and Mamba's package solves fail on some systems2024-07-09
- Got into a tangled state with conda and venv that was hard to recover from2024-06-08
- Environment linking fails with confusing C/C++ bugs that don't occur outside conda2024-06-07
- Conda is absurdly slow for nearly any operation, even on powerful machines2024-02-15
- Waits for long periods during ordinary everyday use, even on fast systems2024-01-23
- Installs unwanted packages without asking, and conflict resolution runs for hours when changing Python version2023-01-15
- Getting started guide is tens of pages of Windows bugs, putting the reader off2022-08-29
- Installing packages became extremely slow, taking minutes to hours or forever2022-07-20
- Documentation is incomplete and building packages is hard without copying snippets2022-03-26
- Dependency resolution is very slow2021-10-04
- Installing packages hangs for 30 minutes while conda tries to solve dependencies2021-07-05
- Installs fail with cryptic errors after downloading gigabytes of packages2021-07-01
- Conda errors are incomprehensible, hiding root causes like multiple Python installs2021-03-21
- Conda packages work on one machine but fail unpredictably on another2020-12-31
- Environment updates are very slow and eventually fail with cryptic errors2020-11-12
- Slow dependency resolution ends in a useless error message when it fails2020-11-12
- Spent three hours chasing conflicting DLL errors that crashed numpy during setup2020-06-24
- Installs and resolves packages on its own, so users don't know what got installed2020-06-08
- Package manager is very slow to respond2019-11-12
- Naive users get into broken package setups because the consequences of actions aren't clear2019-05-03
- Conda's management commands are horrible to use and inconsistent2018-12-06
- Conda command-line interface is hard to use for big deployments2018-10-18
- Conda is too slow to create environments, making frequent testing impractical2018-10-18
- Can't install some packages directly, forcing a switch to pip inside Conda2018-04-30