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I am having issues understanding the current setup of conda environment managers on my machine.

I originally installed the conda package manager from miniforge using homebrew. I setup a few environments and everything was working quite smoothly; the environments showed up at locations:

/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/envs/DeepLearning
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/envs/py311
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniforge/base/envs/test_env

When I started working with tensorflow I read a few online tutorials on how to get it correctly setup on Apple silicon machines, and along the way I followed instructions that included getting the required packages from the github miniforge... long story short I now have these environments in a totally different location, and the previous environments are not accessible by conda-activating their names without explicit path to their location in /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/etc

The new environments' location is

 tf  /Users/name/miniforge3/envs/tf

Question 1) Did I actually install two distinct conda package managers?

Question 2) Do I need to actually keep these two installs, or did it results simply from my noobness during the install process?

Question 3) If I can indeed consolidate my environment to a unique location, how do I uninstall the superfluous one?

I have searched and read quite a few threads, but mostly find advice on how to purposefully keep two distinct conda installations on one machine (which I am not sure I actually need to) or how to have a setup in which calls to each environment use the specific path.

I know I can actually access the old environments using the entire path in the call to the environment, what I am trying to understand is whether or not I actually need to maintain two distinct condas, as I fear this will only cause more confusion in me and potentially conflicts when managing packages.

Sunderam Dubey
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Egonomist
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  • Edit your `~/.condarc` file to have `envs_dirs` entries that point to each environment location. But generally, I don't recommend multiple installations - there is nothing you can't do with just one. – merv Mar 02 '23 at 15:30
  • Thank you so much for replying. I suspected that having two installations would serve no purpose; how would I proceed to remove one of them? Losing the environments originally created by the homebrew install would cause no issue. – Egonomist Mar 03 '23 at 00:02
  • You have installed two conda packages with different name (miniforge, miniforge3) and you dont need the two installs. So you can delete one of the folder to avoid the confusion. You can keep miniforge, as this older one is working and delete the miniforge3. Please refer to this [link](https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/) if you want everything freshly setup in your system. – TF_Renu Patel Jul 06 '23 at 06:33

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