I tell students who are not comfortable managing their python installation to do ENV["PYTHON"]="" before installing PyCall. It does take a while because julia has to reinstall python+packages, but that way I don’t have to deal with the 100 different python versions and package managers they have on their systems. The biggest problem is that there is no indication of what’s going on and so the students panic before the installation completes. There are firewall issues, but in that case students just make their laptop go through their phones’ 4G.