Other commenters link to similar issues with Wayland screen lockers. So I am not sure how the current shiny fixes things.

> python 2

In contrast to Wayland that can be installed in parallel to python 3. So the only reason to remove it is if you enjoy breaking working software.

The difference is that with Wayland there are no design issues that prevent you from implementing it reliably and securely; if it's broken it's an implementation problem that can be fixed.

Also:

> In contrast to Wayland

I don't think Wayland is what you think it is.

Its not that they still had python 2, its that the binary "python" referred to python 2 on ubuntu (it might even still be like this) while other distros had it pointed to python 3.

Given that python versions are incompatible by design you should probably explicitly refer to the version your code supports. At least that is my takeaway from this mess.

This whole situation is a bad trap for novices, given how many tutorials, class slides, etc ask students to copy/paste various invocations of pip and python that may or may not work verbatim on their distro.

Breaking stuff is the first step towards learning to fix stuff.

It's complicated: https://lwn.net/Articles/780737/

But then you are breaking enterprise stuff !!!1!11!

My favourite moment was when fedora turned on CGroups v2 after every distro waited years for docker to update to it. Docker was broken on fedora until you manually turned v1 back on but then docker suddenly upgraded to support v2.