I located a really weird behavior of Jupyter and caused me to reinstall it but the problem persisted.
I have a Windows machine where I have installed anaconda (the latest version). There are two environments:
- (base) Which contains nothing special maybe seaborn pandas etc. and is on python version 3.8.12.
- (tf-gpu) Which contains tensorflow-gpu and is on python version 3.9.7.
Mind you, these two environments are created directly from a fresh installation of anaconda, and I didn't touch anything except installing tensorflow-gpu.
When I launch Jupyter through Anaconda, it launches normally on the home folder "C:\User\user" for both environments i.e. correct packages installed and correct version of python on both. I can also launch an instance of Powershell through Anaconda or Windows, (always in home dir), and launch Jupyter both environments behave as they should (packages, python version). So far so good...
The problem starts when I want to launch Jupyter from a directory other than home dir. I keep all my project files in a separate partition (D:), thus I navigate to that directory through a cmd/powershell (launched through Anaconda or Win) and type "jupyter notebook". The notebooks open on that director and:
When the base env is selected the notebook reports a correct name "base"(
os.environ['CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV']) and python version 3.8.12 (sys.version_info). Everything behave as base env was setup.When the tf-gpu env is selected the notebook reports a correct name "tf-gpu" but I get a python version 3.8.12, which is completely wrong! It should be 3.9.7. I can't import tensorflow since I get an error. Essentially I am in the base env without knowing it.
I then check in the same cli window (tf-gpu) that launched jupyter and
python --versionreports 3.9.7 and of course can import tf run it etc.
Jupyter just reports the environment name but in reality it uses the base environment even though it launched from said env. How can this change?
Why does Jupyter works normally when launched from the user directory?
If this is not solved easily, what is a workaround? Jupyter doesn't recognize symbolic links, and thus I can not navigate to another directory if it is not a subdirectory of home.
Finally, I also tried adding the env as kernel through python -m ipykernel install --user --name tf-gpu --display-name "Tensorflow GPU (tf-gpu)", but it doesn't seem to change a thing.
Update 1:
Of course I activate the tf-gpu through conda activate tf-gpu and check the python version and tensorflow (correct results), the problem is when launching jupyter notebook. The notebook reports the tf-gpu env but wrong python version and tf is missing.
Update 2:
After some searching around it seems that jupyter notebook has much trouble selecting a python version if multiple versions of python are installed in the system (in my case 2, 1 on each environment environments). Which is ridiculous if you think that that's why we are using environments for...