> I really don't understand why you can't just pip install something globally. I want this package to be available to me EVERYWHERE, why can't I do it? I only use python recreationally because everyone uses python everywhere and you can't escape it. So there is a massive possibility I am simply wrong and pip-installing something globally is a huge risk. I'm just not understanding it.

You may have a library that's been globally installed, and you have multiple projects that rely on it. One day you may need to upgrade the library for use in one project, but there are backward incompatibile changes in the upgrade, so now all of your other projects break when you upgrade the global library.

In general, when projects are used by multiple people across multiple computers, it's best to have the specific dependencies and versions specified in the project itself so that everyone using that project is using the exact same version of each dependency.

For recreational projects it's not as big of a deal. It's just harder to do a recreation of your environment.

> I want this package to be available to me EVERYWHERE, why can't I do it?

Because it being available in the system environment could cause problems for system tools, which are expecting to find something else with the same name.

And because those tools could include your system's package manager (like Apt).

> So there is a massive possibility I am simply wrong and pip-installing something globally is a huge risk. I'm just not understanding it.

I assume you're referring to the new protections created by the EXTERNALLY-MANAGED marker file, which will throw up a large boilerplate warning if you try to use pip to install packages in the system environment (even with --user, where they can still cause problems when you run the system tools without sudo).

You should read one or more of:

* the PEP where this protection was introduced (https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/);

* the Python forum discussion explaining the need for the PEP (https://discuss.python.org/t/_/10302);

* my blog post (https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2024/12/24/python-packaging-...) where I describe in a bit more detail (along with explaining a few other common grumblings about how Python packaging works);

* my Q&A on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/posts/291839/) where I explain more comprehensively;

* the original motivating Stack Overflow Q&A (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75608323/);

* the Python forum discussion (https://discuss.python.org/t/_/56900) where it was originally noticed that the Stack Overflow Q&A was advising people to circumvent the protection without understanding it, and a coordinated attempt was made to remedy that problem.

Or you can watch Brodie Robertson's video about the implementation of the PEP in Arch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35PQrzG0rG4.