Why you shouldn’t install Python from the Microsoft Store if you want to do advanced code?

• Article type: Informative article
• OS needed: Windows (with Microsoft Store installed)
• Programming language: Python

(Based on this article).

Overview

Microsoft has provided its own store, with the hope that most of the Windows users will use it for installing anything. On that store, there is a Python distribution. Many users install Python from there. However, most of the Python maintainers recommend to install Python from Python.org.

At this point, you’ll probably ask: “Where is the difference? Why I shouldn’t install Python from the Microsoft Store?”. On this article, we will dive into this theme. For this, I installed Python from the Microsoft Store in a fresh computer, and I were looking for information from other people who tried it. I mixed the results, and wrote them here.

The difference

The Python installer from the Microsoft Store works a bit different than the one from Python.org. It seems like the Microsoft Store Python installer messed up the paths, so the advanced code (console scripts, path manipulations) could not work fine.

The issues I listed here, are directly related to the path differences: The Microsoft Store installer selected a different path to store the programs. As far as I know, that’s caused by a restriction from the Microsoft Store.

The python command

The MStore installer only defined a py executable, but seems like it didn’t define python:

C:/Users/Diego Ramirez>python -c "print('Hello world')"
python : The term 'python' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.
Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

So, you should run python{version}. I mean:

C:/Users/Diego Ramirez>python3.9 -c "print('Hello world')"
Hello world

That’s messy, since most of the Python docs, packages, and articles refer to using python.

Similar issues happen with another “console scripts” (like virtualenv, cxfreeze, etc.)

pip gets confused

Pip depends on the environment variable PATH (or PYTHONPATH?) for installing packages. Also, the Python code uses that variable (expressed as sys.path). But, on a MStore installation, the path where the Python packages are stored is not included in PATH. So, when installing a package with Pip, you may get this:

C:/Users/Diego Ramirez>pip install --upgrade pip
  WARNING: The scripts pip.exe, pip3.9.exe and pip3.exe are installed in 'C:\Users\Diego Ramirez\AppData\Local\Packages\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.9_ghs2n6kfpa4p0\LocalCache\local-packages\Python39\Scripts' which is not on PATH.
  Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.

Pip gets confused with the different paths, and that could affect you. Also, this pip installation contains more executables: pip39 and pip3, which reported some weird behavior recently (even when it should do the same than pip).

My resolution

Let’s stop here for now. Now let’s decide.

Python is awesome. I prefer using it on most of my projects. However, I don’t consider you should install it from the Microsoft Store, unless you get adapted to these issues. I don’t want to discredit that installer, but I personally prefer the Python.org installer, if you want to write advanced stuff. Even the documentation warns about known issues of the MStore installer.

Anyway, it is the most confortable option to install Python, and it works fine with simple code and student experiments. But if you want to jump into a higher level, I recommend you to get Python from somewhere else :)

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