---
title: "Python"
category: "Languages and runtimes"
tagline: "The general-purpose scripting language, with pip and a set of common libraries."
source: "pacman"
package: "python-pip"
command: "python"
website: "https://www.python.org/"
code: "https://github.com/python/cpython"
links:
  - name: "pip documentation"
    url: "https://pip.pypa.io/"
---

## What it is

Python is a programming language known for readable code and a large standard library. It's used for scripts and automation, web services, data analysis and machine learning. pip is its package installer: it fetches libraries from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

## Why it's here

- **Readable and quick to write.** A good first language and a good tool for small jobs.
- **Libraries for everything.** PyPI has packages for almost any task.
- **Many tools need it.** A lot of Linux software is written in Python.

## On CoreDesktop

Python itself comes with Arch. CoreDesktop adds pip from pacman, along with Python libraries packaged by Arch: Pillow for images, PyGObject for GNOME apps, Pygments for syntax highlighting, and docutils and MyST-Parser for documentation. `update` keeps them current with the rest of the pacman packages.

Arch doesn't let pip install into the system Python, so install libraries into a virtual environment for each project, use [uv](/software/uv/), or install Python apps with [pipx](/software/pipx/).

```
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && pip install requests
```