Is it just me, or do other people also have the impression that a lot of sock puppets are advertising for the Astral company on the internet?

That said, I may not have installed super complex packages, but for years now I have never ever experienced one situation (on Windows, ok) where pip did not just work. For me, pip is the way.

I also have the Python folder be a Git repo, and every `pip install` is a commit, and every project is a branch. Why so difficult?