Failure of PyPlot backend in Plots

Hello,
I want to use the pyplot backend to make some 3D scatter plots

using Plots; pyplot()

and I get the following:

sys:1: UserWarning: 
This call to matplotlib.use() has no effect because the backend has already
been chosen; matplotlib.use() must be called *before* pylab, matplotlib.pyplot,
or matplotlib.backends is imported for the first time.

The backend was *originally* set to u'Qt5Agg' by the following code:
  File "/home/pegger/.julia/v0.6/Conda/deps/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/__init__.py", line 14, in <module>
    line for line in traceback.format_stack()


WARNING: No working GUI backend found for matplotlib
WARNING: Couldn't initialize pyplot.  (might need to install it?)
INFO: To do a standard install of pyplot, copy and run this:

if !Plots.is_installed("PyPlot")
    Pkg.add("PyPlot")
end
withenv("PYTHON" => "") do
    Pkg.build("PyPlot")
end

I followed the instructions and restarted julia and tried again to use the pyplot backend, and I got the same thing.

Has anyone ever experienced this and how did you solve it?

Thanks,

Philip

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My advice is to just use the GR backend. The Conda install of PyPlot hasn’t worked well for a few months (at least on Linux and Windows). Using the system Python tends to work well though, at least on Linux, so we should probably change that error message.

If you are on osx, in particular, many of my students had a lot of trouble with pyplot…and gave up eventually

1 Like