I picked up HACK laptops for my kids, this is my first experience with Endless.
My daughter would like to work through some Python books she has but inevitably they require installing modules. I looked a little, it seems like one solution is to use a flatpak sandbox and to be fair I haven’t looked into that in depth yet.
Can a flatpak be built that allows her to install modules with pip? Is there a better solution?
Pip is included in the OS. You should just be able to pip install whatever.
More generally to get Dev tools into the system you can indeed fetch a Flatpak SDK (eg flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk//18.08) and then enter the sandbox with flatpak run org.freedesktop.Sdk and you will have compilers, headers, etc.
pip is not installed in the OS because we do not include Python 2, but pip3 is available. You should be able to run pip3 install --user foo.
You can also install third-party Python distributions like Anaconda into your home directory.
That got me moving. With pip3 I installed virtualenv and that should work out for her.
Thanks everyone.