Python

Virtual environments are great. Best to use them right out of the gate, as Ubuntu apparently has hacked up their version.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install virtualenv
virtualenv my_python
source my_pyton/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip

Here are the things I had to install to get my work env going:

sudo apt install python-pip libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

And that never got me there. More lessons to learn...