Mamba
Conda used to be quite slow when calculating which package versions to choose to create an environment. Now, Conda uses Mamba as a backend by default, so the rest of this section remains only as a reference and is not relevant anymore.
To improve condas slow performance, Mamba was implemented. Mamba is a reimplementation of the conda package manager in C++. It advertises much faster dependency solving compared to conda. It can be used as a base python environment manager instead of conda and can be installed from here.
For most commands mamba is a drop-in replacement for conda. E.g. to install a new package, you can now simply run
mamba install -c conda-forge cadet
Or, to create a new environment:
mamba env create -f environment.yaml