Hi whalesalad, good to meet you! Now that you know me, you can never say that again anymore :-) Although, tbf, I only use conda for my machine learning related projects. I've tried using pip for that but was at risk of massive hair loss.

In the scientific community, there is a widespread "just use anaconda" message. Many people spend their entire lives inside anaconda, and equate it with Python.

Conda is ideal if you need to support Windows environments with large, compiled scientific programming libraries.

So it’s niche.

No. I used it for managing my Mac and Linux environments.

On the other hand, almost everyone I know who does scientific python in grad school loves miniconda...