Explicitly advise to use miniconda

[adam-urbanczyk]

And to install it in a portable way

bitsadmin /transfer myDownloadJob /download /priority normal https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Windows-x86_64.exe .
Miniconda3-latest-Windows-x86_64.exe /S /InstallationType=JustMe /D=%MINICONDA_DIRNAME%
set "PATH=%MINICONDA_DIRNAME%;%MINICONDA_DIRNAME%\\Scripts;%PATH%"
activate

[adam-urbanczyk]

Actually I'd consider proposing to use mambaforge - initial tests indicate that it is an order of magnitude faster

[jmwright]

So we would use the mamba command instead of conda in most cases? Mamba's documentation claims that it builds environments more reliably than conda, but I have no experience with it.

[adam-urbanczyk]

Yes, it is super fast but I don't have that much experience with it. Maybe it is too early to recommend.

[fedorkotov]

+1 for mamba from me.

I tried mamba on top of miniconda on Ubuntu 20.04 today. It is objectively much faster.
My miniconda installation is not new so all packages were already in cache before my experiments.
I created two new environments. Installed cq-editor and cadquery in both (sequentially, not in parallel). I used conda in first environment and mamba in second. Execution time was measured with standard time command.

time conda install -y -c cadquery -c conda-forge cq-editor=master cadquery=master
...
real    1m53.195s
user    1m29.013s
sys     0m4.164s

time mamba install -y -c cadquery -c conda-forge cq-editor=master cadquery=master
...
real    0m20.962s
user    0m17.418s
sys     0m2.050s

[dcowden]

wow, not only is that way faster, but that might even be 'faster than pip' faster. I think a lot of people who like pip probably like the speed, and this would be just as fast, so maybe it would endear that crowd