In this sense I personally prefer pixi because of this. It is pixi like but resolves using conda channels like conda, and similar to conda it supports PyPI packages via uv.
With a background in scientific computing where many of the dependencies I managed are compiled, conda packages gives me much more control.
P.S. I’d like to point out to others to differentiate between package index and package managers. PyPI is an index (that hosts packages in a predefined format) while pip, poetry, uv are package managers that resolve and build your environments using the index.
Similarly but a bit more confusingly, conda can be understood as the index, hosted by anaconda but can also be hosted elsewhere, with different “channels” (kinda like a GitHub organization) where conda-forge is a popular one built by communities. Conda is also a reference implementation of a package manager that uses anaconda channels to resolve. Mamba is an independent, performant, drop in replacement of conda. And pixi is a different one with a different interface by the author of mamba.
Even more confusingly, there are distributions. Distributions come with a set of predefined packages together with the package manager such that you just start running things immediately (sort of like a TeXLive distribution in relation to the package manager tlmgr.) there are anaconda distributions (if you installed anaconda instead of installing conda, that’s what you get), but also Intels distribution for Python, mini forge, mambaforge, etc.
With a background in scientific computing where many of the dependencies I managed are compiled, conda packages gives me much more control.
P.S. I’d like to point out to others to differentiate between package index and package managers. PyPI is an index (that hosts packages in a predefined format) while pip, poetry, uv are package managers that resolve and build your environments using the index.
Similarly but a bit more confusingly, conda can be understood as the index, hosted by anaconda but can also be hosted elsewhere, with different “channels” (kinda like a GitHub organization) where conda-forge is a popular one built by communities. Conda is also a reference implementation of a package manager that uses anaconda channels to resolve. Mamba is an independent, performant, drop in replacement of conda. And pixi is a different one with a different interface by the author of mamba.
Even more confusingly, there are distributions. Distributions come with a set of predefined packages together with the package manager such that you just start running things immediately (sort of like a TeXLive distribution in relation to the package manager tlmgr.) there are anaconda distributions (if you installed anaconda instead of installing conda, that’s what you get), but also Intels distribution for Python, mini forge, mambaforge, etc.