Ubuntu complains now if you try to use pip outside a virtual environment… I think things are in a basically ok state as far as that goes.

Arguably it could be a little easier to automatically start up a virtual environment if you call pip outside of one… but, I dunno, default behavior that papers over too many errors is not great. If they don’t get a hard error, confused users might become even more confused when they don’t learn they need to load a virtual environment to get things working.