After solving enviroment with conda, unable to install mayavi

Question

I have ran into some issue in trying to install mayavi using conda. First it was stuck in the "solving enviroment" step and afterwards I obtained this

(base) usr@pc:~$  conda install -c anaconda mayavi 
Collecting package metadata (current_repodata.json): done
Solving environment: failed with initial frozen solve. Retrying with flexible solve.
Solving environment: failed with repodata from current_repodata.json, will retry with next repodata source.
Collecting package metadata (repodata.json): done
Solving environment: failed with initial frozen solve. Retrying with flexible solve.
Solving environment: / 
Found conflicts! Looking for incompatible packages.
This can take several minutes.  Press CTRL-C to abort.
failed                                                                          

UnsatisfiableError: The following specifications were found
to be incompatible with the existing python installation in your environment:

Specifications:

  - mayavi -> python[version='>=2.7,<2.8.0a0|>=3.6,<3.7.0a0|>=3.7,<3.8.0a0']

Your python: python=3.8

If python is on the left-most side of the chain, that's the version you've asked for.
When python appears to the right, that indicates that the thing on the left is somehow
not available for the python version you are constrained to. Note that conda will not
change your python version to a different minor version unless you explicitly specify
that.

I'm a little bit puzzled by this message, what does it mean "If python is on the left-most side of the chain"? I also modified my PATH and I am using python 3.8, shouldn't the installation work with the most recent version?

Answer 1

It looks like these packages on anaconda channel has not been updated in over a year, but the conda-forge channel has some newer builds , including some for Python 3.8. You could try

conda install -c anaconda  -c conda-forge mayavi

(edited with correct conda-forge link)