Like many other OS distros, we've adopted the mechanism from PEP 668 <https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/> in #OracleSolaris 11.4.69 to keep the system python packages isolated from changes installed by users via pip. We've also started bundling pipx to make it easier to install python applications to virtual environments. https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/python-package-management-going-forward explains more about this.