Anaconda Individual Edition 2020.02: New Name, Exciting Features

We are pleased to announce the release of Anaconda Individual Edition (formerly Anaconda Distribution) 2020.02! There are some exciting new features in this release, but first we’ll touch on the name change. Recently, we added a new product to our suite, Anaconda Team Edition, for package management at the enterprise level. We also have Anaconda Enterprise Edition, a full-featured machine learning platform. With these products, it seemed like the natural thing to do to change the name of Anaconda Distribution to Anaconda Individual Edition, to reflect that Anaconda Distribution has always been designed and optimized for individual use.

This is the first Anaconda release since the Python 2.7 End Of Life – so for the first time, Anaconda is only releasing Python 3 installers. As there are still some key OSS projects that aren’t available or stable for Python 3.8, the installers are based around Python 3.7. Notably, at the time of this release, Tensorflow does not yet support Python 3.8, so installers based around Python 3.8 would cause problems for users who want to use Tensorflow. There are Python 3.6 and Python 3.8 metapackages available with this release, so you can work with Anaconda in other versions of Python as you wish.

conda create -n py38 anaconda=2020.02 python=3.8 or conda create -n py36 anaconda=2020.02 python=3.6

As a reminder of what “metapackages” are, please read our blog post on clarifying the Anaconda metapackage.

Speaking of End of Life, Windows 7 EOL was January 14, 2020. This release of Anaconda supports Windows 7, but it is the last to do so.

We’ve added some helpful links to the GUI installers, fixed the deadlock in Anaconda installer where installer would fail on computers with a single core, and improved menu removal for the Windows uninstaller.

Also, exciting news for Anaconda Navigator fans — we’ve released version 1.9.12 that is available in the Anaconda 2020.02 installers. There are quite a few changes in this version. Though mostly focused on bug fixes, we did include one of the long-requested features: pip packages you’ve installed will now display in your environments in Navigator. On Windows, you’ll see Anaconda Prompt and Anaconda PowerShell tiles on the homescreen. On all platforms, you’ll find PyCharm tiles added if you’ve installed PyCharm on your system. You’ll still see a VSCode tile on the home screen if you already installed it on your machine, but we have dropped support for installing it from Navigator. We also improved the macOS Catalina experience with Navigator, improving difficulties around granting permissions to the various applications Navigator launches. For a full list of changes, please refer to the Anaconda Navigator release notes.

And on top of all that, there are ~125 package updates and 20 newly added packages since the last release of the installer. Package updates include: Pandas (0.25.1 -> 1.0.0), Astropy (3.2.2 -> 4.0), NumPy (v1.18.1 all platforms), Numba (0.45 -> 0.48.0), SciPy (1.3.1 -> 1.4.1), Scikit-Learn (0.21.3 -> 0.22.1), Scikit-Image (0.15.1 -> 0.16.2) and many more.

Also, recently out are new Miniconda Python 3 installers – with the latest version of conda v4.8.2 for Python 3.7 and Python 3.8. The Miniconda3-latest- links will point to the Python 3.7 installers for the same reason the Anaconda Python3 installer is Python 3.7 based. There will be one more Python 2 Miniconda installer release when the anticipated last release of Python 2.7 happens later this year. You can find all the Miniconda installers here.

You can find the full release notes for Anaconda Individual Edition 2020.02 here.

Update to Anaconda 2020.02 now with conda install anaconda=2020.02, or download and install Anaconda 2020.02.