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"I think we need more of these comments from external people." OK. It is obvious there is a massive amount of work in developing Sage, which I appreciate. I've used it before on other systems and it is great. I've also used SageManifolds, now part of the installation, which is also great. But I also agree with the OP that installing Sage (on Ubuntu for me) is ridiculously difficult. Over the years I have had about a 50% success rate. The wins were mainly with prebuilt binaries. All the great work in developing Sage goes to waste if it can't be installed. The current README is inconsistent in its instructions and overly complicated. I have no idea what the a corrected README should say because I couldn't install Sage, so I can't open a ticket to propose an update. When I try to build, ./bootstrap failed to open mpi4py so crashes. Yet mpi4py is installed, I can start Python and import it, so WTF is going on with bootstrap? ./configure complains "package directory is missing. Re-run ./bootstrap." But bootstrap wants mpi4py. And make throws the same error as ./configure. I don't have the patience to pursue this further - I wanted to use Sage for a specific problem, and I have alternatives, including Mathematica on my Raspberry Pi 5. I am happy to let the pi chug while I sleep rather than tear my hair out on trying to install Sage or spending days troubleshooting through back and forth on this forum. I don't know complex Linux build scripts and the OP's very informative comment that the build process is non-standard (aka here lie dragons) means even if I wanted to try to understand it using Google, it would most likely be further fruitless frustration. So yeah, there is a lot of room for improvement on the installation for Linux.