conda taking forever (approximately) to solve environment

[furnstahl]

If you have tried to create the 8820-env environment from the environment.yml file after installing Anaconda and using the Anaconda Navigator and it never got past the "solving environment" stage, it is likely the problem is an outdated version of conda (which is the program name of the package manager itself). The newest version uses a much better (approximately infinitely better) algorithm to solve the environment.

After installing Anaconda on a Windows 11 machine, I started up Anaconda Navigator, went to Environments and selected "base(root)". After clicking the right arrow I selected "Open Terminal". From there I navigated to the folder with the environment.yml file (e.g., after following the "Using GitHub" instructions). When I ran conda list conda, I see that the conda version is 23.7.4. You want 23.11.0.

So update conda with:
conda update conda
This will actually download and update many packages. (It is still using the slow conda, so it will take a little time, but not too much.) When it is complete, run:
conda env create
With the new conda it only took a couple of minutes (on a Windows 11 machine, your mileage may vary) to solve the environment for me and then the rest was also fairly quick.