

Can’t speak for the science libraries as I’ve never used em, and I’ll gladly just blindly accept that as truth, but for everything else it’s always a pain in the ass. For being designed to “run on anything” it sure is funny that 90% of the time I download a python app it doesn’t fucking work and requires me to look up and manually setup a specific environment for it. Doesn’t help that the error messages are usually completely random and unrelated to this…
I always dread when some fucking madman makes the installer for their app in python, knowing it’ll probably fail… God forbid it’s a script that’s supposed to modify something else. Always a good time for reflection upon the choices that led me to this point.
Even my old scripts I kept around for sentimental value. Half of those don’t work either, and I can’t be bothered to figure out what version I made em for.
I tried my best to scrub python from my pc out of principle, but as you say, it’s soo common my distro uses it as a dependency, fucking bullshit!
The nice thing is, you can pretty easily run both and switch around. Just get a distro with one, and then it’s usually just 1 or 2 commands to get the other as a choice on the login screen. KDE and Gnome apps are also largely compatible, regardless of desktop environment.
I’ve been using KDE mostly, it’s just nice being able to customize it so easily without too much technical knowledge of the environment or hoping someone already made an extension for it like on Gnome. Then again, some may like the simplicity of shopping around for extensions and calling it a day, or later even editing the extensions.
Recently, for my tiny laptop I switched to gnome, it’s also just pretty :)