I don’t like how people are trying to stir up dissent and drama around this. The message posted is short and on point, it includes all the important bits. There really isn’t much more to add.

VLC always had a ton of applications, network device playback, TV, streaming server, files, physical media, music player, effects, recording, AV format conversion, subtitles, plugins and so on.

I think VS Code is doing its own thing and it might be better if you create your own. It doesn’t have to be called .venv, that is just a VS Code convention.

python -m venv myenv

and then

source myvenv/bin/activate

should do it.

Otherwise there is something wrong in your path or a weird python installation.

python --version should give you a version number 3.4 or above, because these have venv included and need no additional pip installs

Some NT net utilities even had BSD info in their binaries.

This happened just this morning. Probably not the dumbest thing ever, and I blame Snap for putting things where they don’t belong: I deleted stuff from the /run/user/1000/doc directory. Turns out the files there are in fact hard links to files which actually reside somewhere else. Well, they were, until I deleted them forever.

Background: Firefox (as an Ubuntu snap package) downloads files in some kind of sandbox mode and references stuff there for some obscure reason. That was my weekly reminder to get rid of snap packages because snap sucks in a myriad of ways.