Cross platform conda installer purely based on conda-forge with Python (CPython or PyPy), R and RUST for users.

The 'raison d'être' of this installer is that the anaconda installer does not support arm processors, neighter does the miniconda installer out of the box as both are based on the anaconda channel. There is the miniforge installer though, however this one (as miniconda) installs a (very) basic base environment, and leaves it up to the user to do some more command line magic to get things going.

miniconda and miniforge where designed with CI in mind, (hence the mini prefix) whereas anaconda was designed with the user in mind, if we put this in a table, it becomes clear where maxiconda fits in :

maxiconda is thus the equivalent of anaconda when we want to use conda-forge as a base channel.

maxiconda is also installing things a bit different then anaconda in that it :

1. Installs a small base environment (as miniconda and miniforge do), but as the conda-forge channel is much bigger than the anaconda channel, mamba is added, git is always needed and ofcourse pip is removed!
2. Installs a _spyder_ (application) environment where spyder and all it's dependencies (required, optional and extra) live.⁽¹⁾
3. Installs a maxiconda (development) environment much like the one that anaconda installs in the base environment 😒 modified a bit, as it no longer holds spyder, but ONLY the spyder-remote-server and thus spyder-kernels packages. Furthermore a series of extra packages are added, see here for the full- and current package list.

It is also organized such that, when starting a terminal, the maxiconda environment is activated in an effort to prevent accidentally screwing up the base environment. 😏

OS	Architectures	Python	Download	Install video
Windows	x86_64	CPython PyPy
Linux	x86_64 aarch64⁽¹⁾	CPython PyPy
MacOS	x86_64 M1⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾	CPython PyPy

The conda-forge channel currently only holds a (very old) pyqt=5.9.2 and an (old & semi-broken) pyqt=5.12.3, anyway, both of them only support x86_64 😭

On January 4ᵗʰ 2021 Riverbank Computing Ltd. moved on to the 6-series of Qt and the last release in the 5-series to date is 5.15.3.

An effort to bring pyqt=5.15.3 to conda-forge is underway at the same time support for aarch64 (and thus also M1 I hope?) will be added. The ETA is mid 2021.

As spyder is base on Qt, installing on non x86_64 systems will thus (currently) only yield the base and maxiconda environments.

The installer for MacOS/M1 is not tested on a real 'Big Sur/M1' combination yet.