Installation problem on Windows related to PATH

[agitter]

At a workshop, one participant was unable to use the install scripts to set up the conda environment on Windows. We traced the issue to the PATH on Windows being too long. The contents of the PATH had many repeated entries for some reason, and that was challenging for this participant to clean up on short notice before the workshop.

A workaround could have been to install the Python packages required for the workshop directly from pip instead of using the conda-based scripts.

The developers have had some discussion of creating a Docker container as an alternative to the conda-based setup. However, creating Docker containers that support graphical interfaces is feasible, but challenging.