Best IT Recipes

Anaconda vs Minicond

There are two types of installers in the Anaconda repository :

Anaconda Installers and Miniconda Installers.

What are their differences? Also, for 2-4.4.0.1 the Anaconda2-4.4.0.1-Linux-ppc64le.sh file, what does 2-4.4.0.1 mean?

+154
python anaconda miniconda
Jul 31 '17 at 16:37
source share
7 answers

The difference is that miniconda just sends the repository management system. Therefore, when you install it, there is only a packageless control system. While with Anaconda, it looks like a distribution with some built-in packages.

As with any Linux distribution, there are several releases that collect many updates for incoming packages. That's why there is a difference in version numbering. If you decide to upgrade Anaconda, you are updating the entire system.

+97
Jul 31 '17 at 16:40
source share

According to the original documentation (link is broken now):

Choose Anaconda if you:

  • New to Conda or Python
  • As the convenience of automatic installation of Python and more than 150 scientific packages at the same time
  • Have time and disk space (few minutes and 3 GB) and / or
  • You do not want to install each of the packages that you want to use individually.

Choose Miniconda if you:

  • Do not mind installing each of the packages that you want to use individually.
  • Not enough time or disk space to install more than 150 packages at the same time and / or
  • You just need quick access to Python and conda commands, and you want to deal with other programs later.

I use Miniconda myself. Anaconda is bloated. Many of the packages are never used and can be easily installed if necessary.

Note that Conda is the package manager (for example, the conda list displays all installed packages in the environment), while Anaconda and Miniconda are distributions. Software distribution is a collection of pre-built and pre-configured packages that you can install and use on your system. A package manager is a tool that automates the process of installing, updating, and removing packages.

Anaconda is the complete central distribution package for the PyData ecosystem and includes Python itself along with binaries for several hundred third-party open source projects. Miniconda is essentially an installer for an empty conda environment containing only Conda, its dependencies, and Python. Source

After installing Conda, you can install any package from scratch along with any desired version of Python.

2-4.4.0.1 is the version number of your Anaconda installation package. Oddly enough, it is not listed in their old package lists .

In April 2016, the Anaconda version rose from 2.5 to 4.0 to avoid confusion with Python versions 2 and 3. Version 4.0 included Anaconda Navigator.

Release notes for future versions can be found here .

+272
Jul 31 '17 at 16:59
source share

Miniconda provides you with a Python interpreter, as well as a command line tool called conda that acts as a cross-platform package manager focused on Python packages, similar in spirit to apt or yum tools that Linux users might be familiar with.

Anaconda includes both Python and conda, and also includes a set of other predefined packages for scientific computing. Due to the size of this package, expect the installation to take up several gigabytes of disk space.

Source: Jake Vanderplas Python Data Science Reference

+17
Jul 31 '17 at 16:41
source share

Conda

What is conda?

conda is a package management tool for installing scientific and analytical compute packages that can be written in Python or other programming languages. conda also creates a virtual environment like python-virtualenv.

Read more: Conda

What is anaconda?

conda is Anaconda's package manager. Anaconda is a free Python distribution provided by Continuum Analytics that includes over 195 of the most popular Python packages for science, math, engineering, and data analysis. (Anaconda is a collection of about a hundred packages, including conda, numpy, scipy, ipython notebook, etc.)

Read more: Anaconda

What is a minicond?

You have installed Miniconda, which is a smaller alternative to Anaconda, which is just a condo and its dependencies (unlike Anaconda, which is conda and many other packages like numpy, scipy, ipython notebook, etc.). Once you have Miniconda, you can easily install Anaconda on it using conda install anaconda. )

Read more: Miniconda

Difference between pip and conda?

pip is a general purpose Python package installer. In addition, python-pip and python3-pip are in the default Ubuntu repositories. In most cases, you choose pip instead of conda if you want to install the Python package management application. To create a Python virtual environment without installing conda, you can install python-virtualenv from the Ubuntu Software Center. pip and conda use different packaging formats, so they do not work interchangeably, but you can use both tools next to each other.

Note. 2-4.4.0.1 is the version number for your installation package.

Anaconda Package List

+9
Dec 13 '17 at 9:37 on
source share

2 in Anaconda2 means that the main version of Python will be 2.x, not 3.x installed in Anaconda3 . The current version has Python 2.7.13.

4.4.0.1 - Anaconda version number. The current announced version is 4.4.0 , and I assume .1 is a minor version or for other similar uses. In the Windows editions that I use, just say 4.4.0 in the file name.

Others now explain the difference between Anaconda and Miniconda, so I will skip this.

+8
Jul 31 '17 at 16:40
source share

Both Anaconda and miniconda use Conda's package manager . The main differece between between Anaconda and miniconda, however, is that

The Anaconda distribution comes pre-loaded with all packages, and the Miniconda distribution is just a management system without any pre-loaded packages. If you are using Miniconda, you must download the individual packages and libraries separately.

Personally, I use the Anaconda distribution, since I do not need to worry much about installing individual packages.

The disadvantage of the mini-second is that the installation of each individual package can take a lot of time . Compared to this, installing and using Anaconda takes much less time.

However, there are several packages in Anaconda (QtConsole, Glueviz, Orange3) that I have never had to use. I don’t even know their purpose. Therefore, the disadvantage of anaconda is that it takes up more space than necessary.

+1
Apr 19 '19 at 13:02
source share

Anaconda has a very large installation of ~ 2 GB and is most useful for those users who are not familiar with installing modules or packages with other package managers.

Anaconda seems to be touting itself as the official Jupyter package manager. Not this. Anaconda bundles Jupyter, R, python, and many other packages with its installation.

Anaconda is not required to install Jupyter Lab or R kernel. There is a lot of information available to install Jupyter Lab or Notebooks. There is also a lot of information for installing R studio. The following shows how to install the R core directly from R Studio:

To install the R kernel without Anaconda, start R Studio. In the terminal R window, enter these three commands:

 install.packages("devtools") devtools::install_github("IRkernel/IRkernel") IRkernel::installspec()

Done. The next time you open Jupyter, the R core will be available and available.

+1
May 6 '19 at 20:30
source share


More articles:


All Articles