Today, I wanted to upgrade my Anki version on my Debian 12.x machine from 24.x to 25.latest. So I downloaded the latest 25 tarball, anki-launcher-25.09-linux.tar.zst. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the program itself, but just a set of programs, most notably the launcher, which then greeted me with a menu, including “1) Latest Anki”. When I try to use that, it fails in a number of ways:
Anki Launcher
1) Latest Anki (press Enter)
2) Choose a version
5) Allow betas: off
6) Cache downloads: on
7) Download mirror: off
8) Uninstall
> 1
Checking for updates...
Unable to check for Anki versions. Please check your internet connection.
Error: Failed to run (1): /.../share/anki/uv.amd64 run --no-project --no-config --managed-python --with pip-system-certs,requests[socks] --python 3.13.5 /.../share/anki/versions.py: Fatal Python error: Failed to import encodings module
Python runtime state: core initialized
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'
Current thread 0x00007f027e759740 (most recent call first):
<no Python frame>
Press enter to close...
I have a number of problems with this:
- I have
uvalready, so I would prefer to use that. - ‘uv’ obviously wants a virtualenv, which it doesn’t create, or install system-wide, which I don’t want.
- It’s trying to download a new Python from python.org, which somehow (thankfully) fails, instead of using my system Python 3.11.2, which, according to the documentation, should work.
- Trying to run
uvwith different options to force it to use the system python did not work, either. - And, last but not least, of course I’m online - this is the same machine I’m writing this bug report on, so checking for new Anki releases fails (see above).
In summary, Anki 25 does not get installed.
Where do I go from here, please?