This is another example that non-commercial (open-source) Linux/Python does not have a feel of a finished product: things break out of the box when installed fresh, in the most simple, expected ways, without any tweaks.

Again, don’t get me wrong, open-source free software are good stuff (more modern concepts and people working on it for free), but it’s never going to beat professional companies (like Microsoft/MATLAB) in how well-funded they are so they can maintain their software and the user experience using their profits. So far, users are still expected to put up with a bunch of unjustifiably unnecessary work to get to where they want to go with community-maintained software like Linux/Python.

This time I’m installing Spyder on MX Linux. Look at how many damn hoops I have to jump to get Spyder 3 to function properly there:

1. I installed python3-spyder from MX Package Installer
2. Spyder complained about missing rope on start
3. Installed python-rope on MX Package Installer. The complaint still won’t go away
4. I tried follow the instruction sudo pip3 install rope_py3k  and realized pip3 was not installed already with the Python that came with Spyder! (Didn’t have the problem with the Windows counterpart).
5. Installed python3-pip from MX Package Installer.
6. Came back and run pip3 install rope_py3k. It choked at "Command 'python  setup.oy egg_info' failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-0nnknjhi/rope-py3k". Again, known problem.
7. Followed the solution in the comments pip3 install --upgrade setuptools
8. Then come back and run pip3 install rope_py3k again. It says "Failed building wheel for rope-py3k" in between, but nonetheless I’ll try to move on since it says "Successfully installed rope-py3k-0.9.4.post1"

Then Spyder launch uneventfully.

These are not design decisions (sacrificing one quality for another), but inter-operability wrinkles that nobody are paid enough to do the grunt-work babysitting it. So if your business profits heavily from it, consider sponsoring the developers!

It’s also slightly annoying that the version of Spyder maitained in MX Linux’s most recent repository is a little older than what’s actually available (3.1.3+dfsg1-3 instead of 3.3.4).

At first I followed instructions to have PIP to update it: pip3 install -U spyder, but it doesn’t work. I got a lot of “failed building wheel for (package)” error.

I also realized the Python that came with it is 3.5, not the 3.7(.3) I had in Windows. I checked the MX package manager and indeed it stopped at 3.5. After some searching, I learned the base system package was frozen in 2016! MX Test Repo (at your own risk) has Python 3.7 though.