cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/9251429

I was previously using PopOS! 22.04 on my tuxedo laptop and I’d installed on it Howdy to take advantage of the IR camera and have a windows hello alike face recognition feature.

Everything was working fine, but after some time GNOME 46 and its new goodies were too tempting to stick with Pop’s old GNOME version (at least for me) and therefore I switched to Ubuntu 24.04

However, when I tried to install howdy using the PPAs as I did with Pop I noticed it wasn’t working because of some changes that were made regarding on how Python is managed, and I couldn’t find a solution for that. Looking at howdy’s GitHub issues, there are a lot of them talking about this problem that seems to be started with 23.x versions already, but having so many issues created a bit too much confusion to me and I didn’t manage to find a working solution from there.

Is there anyone here using Howdy on Ubuntu 24.04? How have you managed to install it?

  • shaked_coffeeOPEnglish
    3·
    27 days ago

    Nope I didn’t, but the problem doesn’t seem to be the Python version, but instead the fact that now Python is “externally managed” and therefore I cannot install packages using pip install packagename as it used to be.

    I know that this is done for security reasons and that the good practice would be using pipx or conda, but the problem is that howdy istallation still tries to use the “old approach”

    • Mechanize
      3·
      27 days ago

      I’m no python expert but reading around it seems your only real solution is using a virtual environment, through pipx or venv as you already had found out, or using the

      --break-system-packages

* Allow pip to modify an EXTERNALLY-MANAGED Python installation

  (environment variable: `PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES`)

      pip flag which, as the name suggest, should be avoided.

      EDIT: After rereading I got your problem better and I was trying to read the source for Howdy to see how to do it, so far no luck.

      • shaked_coffeeOPEnglish
        2·
        26 days ago

        Thank you, but the problem is that is howdy installation (that gets automatically executed after I run sudo apt install howdy that tries to run “old fashioned” pip commands. So I should either find a way to tweak Howdy install (like building it from source after changing something maybe?) or disable this system security feature temporarily, install howdy and re-enable it immediately after

        • Mechanize
          3·
          26 days ago

          disable this system security feature temporarily,

          This should be - if I’m not mistaken - possible using the pip env var I posted about earlier, like this:

          PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 sudo apt install howdy

          Or exporting it for the current shell, before running the installation

          export PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1

          But I personally highly discourage it, because - AFAIK - if it even works it will mess up the deps in your system.