Solving environment |
    Solving environment /
    Solving environment -
    Solving environment \
    Solving environment |
    ...

One day it takes 10 seconds, next month it takes 10 minutes, and the month after that it takes 30 minutes and then fails entirely.

That's half of why from 2017 to 2021 I had a yearly "uninstall Anaconda and start fresh" routine. The other half is because I'd eventually corrupt my environments and have no choice but to start over.

Me too. In 2021 it got so egregious that I finally jumped ship. Pip or bust.

Since you specifically mentioned 2021 instead of 2022, I half suspect you had the same experience.

Are you using conda-forge? Solving from over 6TBs of packages can take quite a while. Conda-forge builds everything. This isn't a criticism, but because of that the number of packages is massive.

"You can't use the big channel with all the packages because it has all the packages" isn't an exoneration, it's an indictment.

To answer your question: yes, we were using conda-forge, and then when it stopped building we moved to a mix of conda and a critical subchannel, and then a major GIS library broke on conda and stayed that way for months so we threw in the towel and just used pip + a few touch-up scripts. Now that everyone else has followed suit, pip is the place where things "just work" so now we just use pip, no touchups required.